Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 67

Table of Contents

Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes

by Tom Crosshill

Draftyhouse

by Erik Amundsen

The Womb Factory

by Peter M. Ferenczi

The Latest Apocalypse: Popular Music and the End of the World

by Brian Francis Slattery

Passing Through Each Other: A Round-Table Discussion of Speculative Fiction and Academia

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Suitably Strange: A Round-Table Discussion of World-Building

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: Reading as Performance

by Daniel Abraham

Place to Ponder

Art by Steve Goad

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes

Tom Crosshill

Every day, Mom says goodbye to me for the last time.

I need to go to the office or meet Lisa at the airport or pop out for some milk. I’m lacing my shoes in the hallway when I hear the tap-tap-tap of her heels. I freeze for a moment, then rise to meet her.

Mom stands in the door, elegant in a simple dress. No matter the silvery hair. No matter how her skin, once a smooth dark brown, wrinkles over her bones. You’d never guess she has lived a century. She has no titanium knees, no vat-grown veins, no concession to modernity inside her.

If only her mind were as strong.

“Mom.” I smile at her.

“Rico.” She smiles too, uncertainly. “Must you go?”

“Just for a minute.”

Her breath catches. She reaches for me with one trembling hand. Halts when I wince. Her fingers linger mid-air, gnarled and stained with ink.

She’s been drawing in her upstairs studio. She’s been drawing with the door locked, her work a secret to the world and her agent and me.

I haven’t pried. What might I find, if I opened her sketchbook — scribbles, blotches, scrawls? Proof that her time is up?

Ashamed of the thought, I take Mom’s hand — bony and warm and strong. “I’ll be right back.”

She steps close and presses her face into my chest. Her shoulders tremble. I feel her tears soaking through my shirt.

“Lo siento, Rico,” she whispers.

Every time Mom says goodbye to someone, it’s for the last time. She thinks — no, she knows — that she’ll never see them again. Not the mailman. Not her best friend Abby. Not me.

It’s no tumor, no disease — we’ve run all the tests. Her reasoning is strong as ever. She can tell you how the milkshakes tasted in Miramar, before Fidel came down from the mountains and she left on the Peter Pan airlift. But deep within her mind, something has begun to fail.

And I can’t fix it.

So I pat her back and murmur reassurances in her ear, and try not to think what she’s feeling. Try not to imagine how I would feel, if I knew that I’d never see her again in my life.

This happens every day.

Still I delay what I must do.

“Just build the habitat. You’ll feel better.”

Lisa packs shirt after lopsided shirt into her green Samsonite. After three decades of marriage, the sight is comforting. Lisa’s only happy when in motion. Even her business suit has a space age streamlined look, the collar chic-asymmetric.

“It seems too. . . permanent,” I say. “Like I’m giving up on her.”

“It’s hard, I know. But what if she strokes tomorrow?”

Lisa’s right, of course. The habitat’s a contingency. I won’t have to use it until it’s that or the crematorium.

But can I watch Mom suffer day after day, once there’s an alternative?

“You’re giving her a gift,” Lisa says. “You of all people should know that.”

Me of all people.

I walk to the viewport in the north wall. It sits mounted in a steel band like a ship’s porthole. Below it, a brass plate reads “George Dieter — Captain, Husband, Father. 1960-2049.”

Dust covers the screen. Has it been that long? I reach up to wipe it clean.

Blackness flickers into life.

A turquoise sea laps against a stretch of sand. The beach glares blinding white, studded with regal palms. Beautiful.

I could grab my immersion headset, feel the heat of the sun, hear the breeze coming off the water. But then I’d have to face the man on the sand.

He lies in the shade of a thatched beach umbrella. Perhaps thirty, his body lean and muscular, tanned bronze. Arms stretched out at his sides, eyes closed, face relaxed.

George Dieter. First habitat upload in the world.

“Hi, Dad,” I whisper.

It’s been long since I said those words. Long since I descended into the world Lisa and I built two decades ago. I miss Dad — it’s not that. But every time I went to see him, I didn’t find the man I was looking for.

“Mom’s drawing again,” I tell Lisa. “She won’t, after.”

I offered to give Dad a ship, after he uploaded. I offered to give him virtual seas to sail, cargo to carry, battles to fight. He only told me, “I’m tired, son.”

I learned that lesson well, those early years before our IPO. Maybe it’s the lack of biochemical stimuli, maybe it’s a shortcoming in the iterative neural matrices — uploads just don’t care.

Lisa zips her suitcase and comes to me. She slides between me and the viewport, wraps her arms around me. “Come with me to LA. Emily and I, we’ve got miracles to show you. There are breakthroughs coming down the pipe that—”

“Breakthroughs?” I pull back without meaning to. “Every month, heck, every week we get some breakthrough. We all rush to try it and blog it and show it off. Aren’t you scared we’re losing our humanity?”

“Oh, but we’re not human anymore! We’ve fragmented into a thousand different species. With every new technology we choose to adopt — or not — there are more of us.”

“You’re spouting Emily again.”

Lisa turns away, goes back to her suitcase. “She’s a brilliant woman.”

“She’s our competitor.”

“Should we miss out on a chance to change the world again, just because Emily works for the wrong corporation?”

On the screen, Dad gets up on his elbows and watches someone approach. A lithe figure and beautiful, strikingly dark against the white sand. A simulacrum of Mom as she once was. The thing can’t even hold a conversation, but Dad doesn’t seem to mind. He reaches out a lazy hand and grasps her, and draws her down atop him.

The screen blurs.

I turn away. “I never wanted to change the world. I wanted to preserve it.”

Lisa seems not to have heard. “I’ll call you from LA.” She wheels her suitcase to the door.

Before she can open it, a knock comes. We jump, both of us. “Come in,” I call.

Mom enters. “Rico, I—” She sees Lisa. “I. . . I thought you left already, dear.”

“Hello, Alina.” Lisa keeps her gaze on the floor. “I’m running late.”

As Lisa walks past, Mom parts her lips in a silent cry. She reaches for Lisa’s shoulder. Pulls back as if scalded.

Just like that, Mom lets Lisa go.

I watch the tear that rolls down her cheek. I watch it, my eyes dry as they have ever been. I envy her.

I’m a coward that night. But the next day I call Mom from work.

“Mom.”

A faint draw of breath in my cochlear. “Rico.” Pause. “I’m glad you called.”

I wait for more, but nothing comes.

“Mom, I’ve been thinking. Your house in Miramar. The one with the grand patio and those big old doors. What color were those doors?”

Silence. “What’s this about?”

“You showed me those photos a thousand times. I close my eyes, and I see that house. But I got to thinking I never knew the colors.” When Mom says nothing, I add, “That’s the place you were happiest, isn’t it?”

“You’re building me one of your things.”

Your things. That’s all she calls the habitats, ever since she saw what Lisa and I created for Dad.

“Must you do that?” she asks me.

I press my face against the window, look across Northwest Portland to home. The tiles of our roof shine red amidst the trees of Nob Hill. I imagine Mom on the veranda, the question in her eyes.

“We need to prepare,” I tell her. “Before you. . . Before it’s too late.”

“. . . okay.”

“Okay? Really, you’re fine with this?”

“This has nothing to do with me,” she says.

“I don’t want to lose you, Mom.” The words come out hard and fast. “Does that make me a bad person?”

“The doors were green,” she says, after a while. “Green like bananas not yet ripe. We had the greenest doors in all of Miramar. They stood out from blocks away. On the last day, when my father drove me to the airport. . . I looked back at the end of the street and saw only a glimpse of green. I knew that I’d never see those doors again.”

“You’ll see them again.”

I stand there by the window, listening to Mom breathe. Waiting for some answer, question, request. Anything to let me believe this is an actual dialogue, a real conversation between two human beings.

“Rico?” she asks at last.

“Yes, Mom?”

“Don’t hang up.” Her voice catches. “Stay on the line for a while, will you?”

I do. For a while.

I go home late — late enough to be sure Mom’s asleep. Lisa calls as I close the door behind me.

“Rico!” she chirps in my cochlear. “Check the mail.”

I scan the shelf by the door. A cardboard box. I recognize Lisa’s cursive on the label. “What’s this?”

“Something Emily and I cooked up.”

Emily again? I tear open the box and extract an immersion headset — a thin gray headband, with the initials LE etched on the outside. “Tonight’s a bad time for toys, Lisa.”

“Put it on. Trust me, honey.” I can hear her smile. “Just get yourself comfortable first.”

Perplexed, I move into the living room and sink into my reading chair. A heavy leather recliner, it’s the only piece of furniture in the whole house older than a decade. I had to fight Lisa to keep it when we moved up to Portland.

I put on the headset. “Okay.”

“Meet you there!”

One by one my senses disconnect. The world quiets. I can’t feel the leather under my fingers. I notice the faint scent of Stumptown Organic — Mom’s favorite coffee — just as it evaporates. Black falls across my vision.

Then, immersion.

Warmth envelops me.

My toes curl on cool glass.

Nighttime. I look out over a golden city. Ten thousand towers lit up bright, far below. New York revolves stately around me.

No, it’s not New York that revolves, but I. A glass box of a room surrounds me, suspended at the end of a lever from the top of the Chrysler Building. The lever turns, and the streets of Manhattan float past below.

My breath comes fast. Dizzy, I brace myself against the glass wall.

“It’s a Bocelli design.”

Lisa stands behind me, at the side of a gigantic mahogany bed covered in white satin. She too wears white — sheer silk pajamas that cling to her skin. Her perfume caresses me delicately.

I struggle to resist, but I feel myself stiffening inside my own pajamas. This place. . . I note the clear glass shower booth in the corner. The mirror centered in the ceiling.

“Really, Lisa? You know I don’t go for this stuff.” We tried immersion sex, early in our marriage. It never felt any better than dream sex — than mental masturbation.

“This is different,” Lisa says. “We’ve hit on something.”

She gestures, a flick of her wrist. Her clothes melt away, as do mine. She stands before me naked and beautiful — and real, so very real. No glorified avatar, this. I see the stretch marks on her thighs, the slight flab of fat on her midriff, the wine-stain birthmark on her left breast.

She smiles, a slight upturn of her lips.

Blood pounds in my ears. I’m hard as I’ve ever been, the brush of cool air tantalizing against my skin.

“So you got modeled for textures,” I manage to force out. “That doesn’t mean—”

“It’s more than that.” Lisa steps forward, reaches for my cheek. “This is me, Rico. Genetically. Chemically. Truly.”

Her fingers make contact.

There’s no faking her touch. No faking the bolt of electricity down my spine.

I embrace her. Pull her close, shivering at the wonder of her skin against mine.

We fall onto the bed and cling tight to each other. My body recognizes the whole of her pressed against me — her heat, her scent, her strength, and so much more.

With a hunger I’d forgotten I possessed, I slide into her. She arches against me. We gasp as one and slip into an urgent beat. I kiss her lips, kiss her nose, kiss her sweat-slick brow as we climb the slope to climax. She smiles at me and cries out my name.

When the end comes, some wonderful minutes later, I convulse against her and think — this is better, this is better, this is better than the real thing. . .

After, I lie on my back, her hand in mine, and listen to my heart calm its beat. “We’ve got to put this in our habitats.” What if Dad could feel this real? What if Mom could? Might it make a difference?

“I’ve already started negotiations. Emily’s offering us a joint venture.”

“Oh. That’s great.” I pause, uncertain. “Lisa? I’ve missed you.”

She smiles. “Me too, Rico. I want to be there for you. With this new tech, we can see a lot more of each other.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You should hear what Emily’s got in mind,” she says. “Once you’re capturing genetic makeup, it’s a single step to information transfer. Immersion induced pregnancy.”

“. . .pregnancy?”

“Procreation is the only limit to our fragmentation as a species,” Lisa says. “But procreation is just information exchange. Theoretically, I could mate with a piece of software.”

I gape at her.

Lisa pats my cheek. “Don’t worry, I won’t. Not with a stud like you around. Now I’ve got to go. Say hi to your mother from me, will you?”

Before I can answer, she disappears.

The living room snaps into reality around me as my teeth click together.

Lisa’s voice reverberates inside my skull. Can you imagine. . .?

I sit there alone, covered in sweat. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticks the seconds away. Cold sperm dries on my leg.

“. . . it’s like she sees another person in me.” I pick at my omelet. “Like we disagree on who I am.”

Mom sips coffee and draws in a sketch pad with her free hand. She glances up at me once in a while. Hers is an artist’s gaze, all-encompassing.

She used to draw me every morning, while I ate before school. The price of my breakfast, she called it. I pretended to mind, but I kept all the drawings. A thousand penciled sketches of a teenager slurping down rice and beans.

That was long ago. Today, it feels right that Mom should draw me. I need her to look at me. I need her to see me as I am and reassure me.

She only says, “Your father gave me black soles.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw the home you built for him. The beach. The palms.”

“That’s what he asked for.”

“I saw the girl,” Mom says. “He asked for her too?”

“Dad didn’t want to be without you. You can have a companion too, in your habitat.”

Mom stops drawing. “Why would I want that?”

“I thought. . . you loved Dad, didn’t you?”

“I’ve said my goodbyes,” Mom says, “even if he hasn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

Mom sets her pen aside. “George was a good man. He loved me well. But understand, Rico — I was more than a woman to him.”

“You were the love of his life.”

“Yes. The black love of his life.”

“Mom, I don’t think—”

“I left Havana in ‘62. Two hundred miles between Miramar and Miami. You know what else was two hundred miles? The distance between a Cuban and a nigger.”

Mom speaks the word nonchalantly, without anger, but I flinch even so. “Dad. . .did he. . . I mean, he never called you. . .?”

“Of course not,” Mom says. “Your father gave up three jobs over me. He fought big men for me. Once he got stabbed for me. So what if he wanted me to meet all his Waspy friends? So what if he wanted the whole world to know I was his? I loved him, and thought he loved me.”

“Didn’t he?”

“So he told me. He always told me sweet things.” Mom smiles. “One day he said I was God’s only perfect creation.”

“I’m sure he meant it.”

“A few days later, we were messing around by the pool. He grabbed my foot and held it up. ‘Here!’ he shouted. ‘Proof that God screws up!’” Mom gestures grandly, the motion eerily evocative of Dad. “I was beautiful and perfect to him — except for the pale undersides of my feet. Like God poured a bucket of brown paint over my head, and forgot about my soles.”

“He was joking.”

“I’ve seen the girl he’s got, on the beach you gave him. The girl who looks like me. I’ve seen her soles.”

Could it be? I rack my memory. Did Dad tell me what to do? I wouldn’t have made a mistake like that, would I?

“Don’t glare like I’ve spit on his grave,” Mom says. “George loved me. I know that. Just as I know that Lisa loves you, even if she sees a man in you that you don’t always recognize. Our lovers are never the people we love, not exactly.”

It happens a week later, as I’m leaving for a client dinner.

Mom catches me in the hallway and wraps me in her embrace, and weeps on my shoulder. She clutches her sketchbook in one hand. Its edge digs sharply into my ribs.

I pat her back and murmur assurances, thinking ahead to the evening’s negotiations. Then Mom twitches and gasps, and collapses.

For some moments I stare at her. I’m shocked, and surprised that I’m shocked at this most expected of events. Then I start CPR and dial the office. Within minutes we’re in an ambulance, screaming across Portland. An oxygen mask on Mom’s face, her sketchbook still locked in her grasp.

Severe heart attack, my team tells me. No repairing the damage.

They rush her into OR One, and strand me in the marble-and-gray-leather waiting room. I watch through the wall as a dozen figures in scrubs fight to stabilize her for upload. With all my practice at saying goodbye, I should be calm, but I can’t breathe.

At some point in the next hour, Lisa comes. She hugs me and kisses me and does her best to console me.

I stare at her head. She has shaved it bald since this morning. It gleams in the sterile light from the OR.

“I’m getting a port installed,” she explains. “It’s for this new crossfire app. . .”

I let her words drift past me. When she falls quiet for a moment, I speak into the silence — because speaking is easier than thinking.

“What if every goodbye is really the last one we get?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You talk about fragmentation. Every time you stuff a new gadget into your brain, you fragment away from the human race, right?”

Lisa shrugs. “Sure.”

“I don’t think you need a gadget. Every time you leave the room, you come back a different person. Ten times a day you fragment away from me. A hundred times. Every time you walk out the door, I’ll never see you again.”

A thousand times I should have said goodbye to you. A thousand times, as I lost the woman that I loved.

“That’s great, Rico.” Lisa chuckles. “We’re human fractals, huh?”

“Yes.”

Loosely coupled fractals — that’s what we are. We split and divide, hoping that the near-random walk of our fragmentation will bring us close enough to interact. To procreate. To love.

Once Mom is conscious and ready for upload, I ask Lisa to leave me with her.

“I’ll see you at home,” she tells me.

I’m not sure she will.

Mom lies entangled in wires and IV lines. She was never a small woman, but the operating table dwarfs her. She looks out of place and powerless and scared.

But a faint smile curves her lips as I approach. “Today’s the day, huh?”

I sit down by her side and take her hand and tell her the truth. “I’m not ready to let you go.”

“I know.”

“See what I built for you, Mom.” I press a few buttons, and the circular walls of the OR light up.

A house with an elegant colonnade, its doors a rich green. An indoor patio lit by a soaring skylight, with dark wooden rocking chairs and a blinding white canvas stretched on an easel. A bedroom with tall windows that look out on the sea — they hold no glass, only wooden shutters to close against the evening chill.

Wonder touches Mom’s eyes. “It’s beautiful, Rico. Just as I remember it.”

I get to my feet, my heart pumping fast. “You want to go there, Mama?”

“This house belongs to the girl I was.” Mom sighs. “That girl is gone.”

“But Mom, you love this house—”

“Don’t you give me black soles!”

My hands drop to my sides. “I’ll do whatever you decide, Mom. I want you to be happy.”

“I am happy. A little bit afraid, but happy. I’ve got no more goodbyes to say but one.” Mom smiles. “You can keep me in that house if you like. It won’t be me, not really — but you know that, don’t you?”

“I need you.” I blurt out the words before I can stop myself. Then I stand there, my face flushed, as vulnerable as I have ever been.

“Where’s my sketchbook?” Mom asks.

“It’s outside. It’s not sterile.”

“What does that matter?”

So I bring it in. Mom gestures for me to open it. With trembling fingers, I flip the cover.

I stare for long moments at the drawing that faces me. Then I turn the page. And another.

I leaf through the sketchbook in a confused daze. This is what Mom’s been working on?

“I draw what I see,” she says.

What she saw was a hundred figures. A hundred middle-aged men. In t-shirts and business suits and bathrobes and beach shorts. Some tired, some eager, some angry, some sad.

All of them me.

I recognize none of them.

That’s fragmentation too. It’s not just the people around you who change.

I’m not the boy who loves Mom’s rice and beans.

I’m not the guy who loves Lisa.

I’m the man who can’t let go.

“I loved every one of you,” Mom says to me.

I cling to those words like a lifeline. Here’s one constant throughout all my splintering changes. It’s not fair that I must give that up.

“I said goodbye to every one of you,” Mom says to me.

I stare at her for moments. I stare at her for a long time, even as her breathing grows labored and her heartbeat uneven.

The decision races at me full speed.

Can I give her up?

Can I keep her bound? Constant, unchanging from year to year in her virtual prison, while I fragment and break and splinter away?

Will she love me if I do?

Will I love her?

Or will I let dust gather on the screen of her viewport?

I only know this:

In a while, Mom will take her final breath.

In a while, I’ll make a decision.

And then, whatever that decision, I’ll say goodbye to her for the last time.

About the Author

Tom Crosshill’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and has appeared in venues such as Intergalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed. In 2009, he won the Writers of the Future contest. After many years spent in Oregon and New York, he currently lives in his native Latvia. He’s a satellite member of the writers’ group Altered Fluid. In the past, he has operated a nuclear reactor, translated books and worked in a zinc mine, among other things.

Draftyhouse

Erik Amundsen

Shenroos is a lucky man. He can relax at a fireplace in green velvet on the moon. He is lucky because he has solitude. Eight days, he has been the sole inhabitant of Draftyhouse. Just him, the Bridgeway, a well-stocked cabinet of floral liquors in every shade between green and purple and all the matching flavors of intoxication and a hundred million places where the air is leaking from the great stone mansion into the void. The man in the moon is having a private party, celebrating his eviction, six days overdue but not yet enforced by the Colonial Army. There is a three-hundred-year-old ghostwood coffee table in front of him, his marching orders open on it, a coaster for his collection of glasses and empty bottles.

Draftyhouse gets like this. Lonesome but never alone. No one has come to take his place, so Shenroos feels justified in squatting. There must be someone here to mind the spiders and husband the flies.

The spiders work by instinct trained into their line over many generations. They are sensitive to the places where the air seeps out and driven to spin webs there. Feeding the spiders falls to the flies, and feeding the flies falls to the carcass of an elk brought over the Bridgeway in Shenroos’ wheel-barrow, upended into the crackling room with its slats like the exposed ribs of the carcass, named for the obvious.

Hauling the carcass of an elk must fall to an astronaut, therefore a gentleman. Common folk aren’t fit for outer space and so, in leathers and a helmet and bearing a cart full of ripe elk, comes Shenroos: twenty-eight years of life and twenty-one spent in the walls of this house with the Bridgeway supplying food and water and air. He owns seven rooms of Draftyhouse. Lord of the manor by three rooms and by noble obligation, the only one who sticks around.

Draftyhouse is larger than some sublunary villages, encased in tall blocks of angled stone. There are a scattering of luxurious, dangerous windows, like arrow-slits from the ancient castles, poured thick with distorting glass. The house breathes a long sigh, exhaling the air that flows across the Bridgeway into space. Every change in that stirring of air registers in the hairs on Shenroos’ neck. A breach would slam the great door shut, sever the Bridgeway and abandon Draftyhouse to Mother Moon. Drink does nothing to dull that sense of doom, nor sleep, nor any task.

Shenroos is a lucky man because he is aware of death in every twitch of his every nerve, every division of every cell. The surface of the moon is littered with many other places so abandoned and walkers who go outside sometimes come back from those places with the remains of foreign outposts and foreign dead to decorate the house. Shenroos’ ancient wheelbarrow has brought more bones than just elk into Draftyhouse.

Shenroos, when he stirs, presses his hand or his ear to the walls, places carved with mottos and poems, bas-relief and pattern. There are no walls in Draftyhouse not in the work of astronaut hands or old hunting tapestries for the privacy of the spiders beneath, weaving, listening. They all listen to the slow language of the walls, the drone of earthy consciousness, telluric current pulsing in the stone like sap through a slow, ancient tree. It is that current which keeps Shenroos close to the floor and his limbs the proper weight. The attraction weighing him and anything it touches down, the shared circulatory system of a composite entity.

Shenroos studied the principles and equations behind it, not for scholarship but self-discovery. You do not jump in Draftyhouse, unless you like a close view of the vaulted ceilings. When you sleep, you sleep on the floor, like a monk.

Shenroos reels through the chambers of Draftyhouse when he is not reading ghost stories. He’s drunk and uninspired. Shenroos has composed stillborn, premature poems, bitten off at their cords and his mouth is rusty at the corners from the birthing. Epics in old traditional styles about hunters tracked by ghosts across snowy hills, priests giving prophecy, their sleeves and pockets stiff with gore. Then he finds the ghost. He has been looking for words worth carving into these walls and a place to carve them. There are places, spaces, nooks and crannies accreted over the place like luster on a pearl, some well hidden. None untouched. Shenroos is looking over those overlooked corners when the ghost rides through, slouched on the spectral body of an elk in the leathers and helmet of an astronaut.

Shenroos mistakes its scratching for the sound of a rat. Wise rats do not come to the moon, foolish ones get hunted by all present in grand affairs that go on from the first sighting of the little animal until its death. The thought of a rat of his own to hunt and stalk is enough to perk his sodden sensibilities. His eyes seek out movement in the dim of the house, pale glow of the cold-lighting, but what they see isn’t movement, just an image that Shenroos’ brain wants to make into a shadow of a curtain and the silhouette of a hunting trophy. This is not what his brain wants there to be. The ghost becomes clear.

The ghost does not look at him; the elk does. Not one of the slate-furred animals of Shenroos’ native forests. This one is the color of an old scab, the color of a priest’s trailing sleeves. Shenroos knows better than to trust his eyes, the hour, or anything else but his feet. They are bare against the cold stone of the floor, and through them, he feels a thing, light, but present in the telluric current, in front of him, a thing moving, a thing with mass.

The ghost’s arms are tangled in the beast’s antlers, the head, a half-grinning, jawless skull nods in the helmet, the lines and ink of the astronaut’s facial marks transferred from the flesh to the bone. The flesh resolves between those markings, an astronaut family that Shenroos does not know, and the skull beneath.

When he was the only little boy on the moon, Shenroos learned to read lips. This puffy mouth, chapped with frost crystals, the swollen tongue, they ask a question before elk and rider vanish like a shape in fast-moving clouds.

Shenroos kneels, putting both hands to the slate of the floor to feel the current of the house. His hands come up black with a thing that bothers him more in its inexplicable presence than a ghost astronaut mounted on a spectral elk.

Shenroos puts his tongue to the pad of his hand and does not like the taste or the cloy of the stuff. This is not a residue of the house, this is novel, and novel is another word for lethal when one lives a few inches of always-more-porous-than-you-think stone away from the void. Shenroos tries very hard to explain this as a thing that one might see on the sixth day of hard drinking, an argument that he would find persuasive, but for the movement in the current.

Shenroos can tell his eyes they do not see a shook from the snowy forests of the afterworld bearing some poor bastard astronaut off to the cold hells on the moon. Shenroos cannot tell his current-sense, his house-sense anything. It tells him.  

Shenroos is in no position to listen. He drags toward his room and checks again that the current did register something besides him, somewhere in Draftyhouse did, in fact move. It did. Shenroos vomits and the moon spins. He checks again.

The astronaut has not been sleeping these last few days so much as losing consciousness. Shenroos is not surprised to find himself in a snowy forest. Shenroos is covered in blood and his feet are numb, but the blood isn’t his, so he goes forward, the pull of dream-necessity is too strong to recognize or fight.

The blue spruces and black pines give way to the mountains and mares of the moon, but the snow continues to fall and those red elk, the shook, are following, bellowing soundless cries in the vacuum, smelling the blood all the same.

In the ghost stories, shook have a bite like a tropical lizard; their stink gets in your blood and they can follow you anywhere. Shenroos is wearing his astronaut leathers, all treated and sealed against the void, but there is snow melting in his hair. His helmet is off. Shenroos can’t tell if he is breathing, if his blood is boiling, if his heart is beating out a futile rhythm against nothing. He is in the house and the snow is falling. The dead astronaut comes to him.

“What is the purpose of the Draftyhouse?” That was the question on the ghost’s lips. The snow falling in the house is ash and soot. Shenroos loses the dream to sleep and then sleep to dull pain and cold. He wakes, soot on his bedding.

Shenroos celebrates his return to sobriety with the last and best of his non-alcoholic rations. Tomorrow would normally bring food to the Bridgeway for the next week or so. The day after, they would check to see if it has been taken, and, if not, the third day would bring a party. Untouched supplies usually meant a suicide, something that happens when a lone astronaut stays to mind the house. Hanging has always been popular in Draftyhouse; the trick is to understand the length of your rope and make sure your toes are touching at all times.

No one in the history of Draftyhouse has ever just gone outside.

Shenroos repeats the ghost’s question; a popular question in the sublunary. Shenroos pulls out his family’s sounders, feels a stab of guilt at the dust on them and begins to set up an experiment. There is almost nothing left for him to discover with the antiques he fits together, nothing that he cannot learn just by walking barefoot in the chilly place, putting his hands to the stone. Shenroos has lived so long dependent on the Bridgeway and the telluric current-augmented gravity for light and air, water and the weight of the earth keeping his limbs and lungs strong, he is sensitive to it. Most marriages do not last so long.

Since the astronaut families first arrived, the moon has been tried out for many purposes but everything man puts here eventually fails. Draftyhouse will be no different; each creak of the wood fixtures, each shift of the stone tells Shenroos of the doom of this house, the mottos and poems in the stone will one day sit in airless cold darkness.

Covered in soot. Shenroos is finding it on all surfaces he checks; fine, greasy, streaks in odd places in the rooms that fall under his titles. Other places are almost coated and his sensibilities tell him that there is more weight inside the house. Something new has arrived, bringing ghosts.

There are only four uses that mankind has found for the moon. The first is for storage of things that benefit from no light, no heat and no air. Draftyhouse’s operation is based on the proceeds from the archives, vaults and tombs kept behind air doors and umbilicus hook-ups.

The second is for storage of things that cannot safely be kept on earth; residue of mankind’s unhealthy flirtations with fissiles, wastes of societies enlightened enough not to pretend that they are forever buried or drowned. The third is for astronomy and telescopy, particularly here on the dark side, but resources are elsewhere these days.

The last is for the Bridgeways themselves, telluric tunnels that would ignite the atmosphere around them if left unattended, and may one day bring more distant spheres under man’s dominion. Assuming man manages to get past the hurdle of distance that keeps the moon their only destination. Some idiots look for ways to make the Bridgeways into weapons, too, because what’s a sphere in the dark worth if you are not its sole owner? The man on the moon laughs at the notion. Shenroos’ people did attempt to fight on her surface, twice. History cannot record what kind of disasters they were, it would have required someone survive.

Shenroos hooks all the equipment to the vacuum generator, a long, thin tube lined with turbines and occultations that lead, eventually, outside. Shenroos sits next to the intake for a moment, listening to the artificial quietus of his home while the equipment begins to power up. Then he begins to hunt for ghosts.

Flies land on his ledger. A few of them go into the intake only to be swallowed up. Flies are always attracted to the outside. The air doors are always full of their carcasses.

Shenroos has had enough sleep and enough sobriety to doubt his eyes, but never does he the kinesthetic connection between his body and his big, inefficient monument to faded vainglory. The telluric current speaks to the base of the survival instinct, the egg at the root of the tree of his life. Shenroos is a lucky man; Shenroos knows to listen and knows how to listen. The instruments are out today only so that he can have his senses recalled and validated.

The moon is silent and dead inside, but large structures do settle, and this is one of the reasons why so many places end up derelict and shut off from sublunary. A shift can bring the joining of a place off true; there are some cracks that chemical sealants and spiders cannot patch. There are meteor strikes; man has learned that even the tiniest speck can strike with a force that no bullet can match. Some stations have been blown wide open. The readings do not bear a strike, and they don’t bear settling, either. The readings don’t bear anything in records at all. Only that several tons of matter have silently invaded the house and Shenroos is not nearly as drunk as he needs to be.

What is the purpose of the Draftyhouse? Others, over brandy, shadows thrown by the great fireplace, passed the question over and over like a mid-point pennant in some ancient joust.

“Pride. We could make Draftyhouse when no one else could. We can keep it operating for two hundred and forty-three years when no one else can keep a structure half the size open for half the time.”

Shenroos is the man on the moon, so he finishes his thought.

“We might have to look up at their flag and salute it, but everyone looks at the moon.”

Down in the sublunary, the barometers will register that Shenroos has used the generator. That’s bound to get someone’s attention. At this point only a blindfold and a bullet are going to save face down there. So be it.

So be it. Shenroos is exhausted from the calculations and the readings, but he is vindicated. There is something in the Draftyhouse besides him, something moving. Whether it is an astronaut ghost on a shook, Shenroos can’t bring himself to care. His eyes are heavy. His body is still thirsty, and the cabinet is close to hand and close to full.

The ghost comes to visit Shenroos by the fireplace when the fire is out. Shenroos last remembers putting a log on it and sitting back down on his father’s favorite chair, and here he is, right where he left himself. It’s cold. There is more soot in the house when he wakes. The webs in the corners of the rooms are black. The Bridgeway helps the house retain some heat, but anyone who has ever come here from the sublunary, all they do is huddle by the fire and complain about the cold. Even his people, their northern latitudes and high altitudes, grey-elk and heavy furs, they shiver.

Shenroos has fallen asleep still slightly drunk and dressed as an astronaut. He doesn’t remember putting the suit on, but it was possibly his last chance to disgrace the uniform, and he’s jumped.

Shrunk inside of his leathers, the ghost is not wearing his gloves or his helmet. His face is transparent to the bone below, his hair sun-faded, dry. He sighs at Shenroos and turns away. The house smells of sweet soot, now. Shenroos’ leathers are stained with it.

Shenroos feels it, the palpitation, dearer than his heart, in the current. Ghost forgotten, Shenroos drops from the chair to his knees. His hands tear the rug aside and splay out flat to the stone of the floor.

The house has not breached. The spiders still spin in their crevices, the gods are in their heavens, Draftyhouse is not moments away from shutting itself to the sublunary forever. There is movement in every corner of the house. Invisible weight; Shenroos feels the deliberate tread in numbers he only imagined in the days when the Draftyhouse’s ballroom still held functions.

Shenroos can see the soot in the air, settling.

Shenroos begins to stagger, stopping every few steps to press his cheek to the stone of Draftyhouse’s walls. Twenty-one years of living in constant contact with the current has made his body the almanac, all the instruments he needs.

Shenroos’ lips are black from the soot, cheeks smeared over his astronaut marks. The ghosts start arriving.

They don’t appear to his eyes at first, but then a young girl is before him in her backcountry garb, her hair plaited in seven pigtails. Shenroos presses his lips to the wall and feels the weight of her little feet. He passes the crackling room. Flies land at the corners of his eyes, iridescent blue, frustrated; all this death and none of it to eat. The spiders have come out. He sees them on every wall, scuttling, confused. Shenroos wants to tell them something, but Shenroos cannot talk, not to the ghosts or the flies or the spiders or the flickering current of his home; he can only listen.

Shenroos’ leathers are stained almost black. His hair is sticky. Ghosts pass him, holding their transparent arms to hug their insubstantial ribs. Shook, some skeletal and some still in ghostflesh, prance in the halls. The moon was supposed to be a hell in the old days; priests sermonized on the terrors mankind would bring to the earth by opening Bridgeways.

The Bridgeways.

There is something in the soot on the wall where Pigtails’ gaze fell. Shenroos wipes it off with a finger and looks closer. Hair, half burnt, too long to be his.

What is the purpose of the Draftyhouse?

Shenroos feels another flicker in the current, a jerk from the far end, in the sublunary. The air pressure increases, the spiders scuttle away from their webs. Shenroos feels the arrival of more cold, frightened souls through walls of his house. Draftyhouse is an exhaust vent. It is a chimney for a crematorium, opened instantaneously, anywhere. A stable Bridgeway whose other end opens and burns all it touches. The ultimate weapon, the reason no one has come to get him. No one assumed that Shenroos would survive the first test. No one assumed that the air drawn each time the weapon deployed would sustain the one man stupid, stubborn and drunk enough to stay behind. What is the purpose of Draftyhouse? The blindfold and the bullet; so be it.

No. Unacceptable.

Shenroos shouts at the atrium to the Bridgeway, screams, though the effort breaks his head like a quail egg. A haze of soot answers, floating through the halls. Flies land and taste everything; some get stuck to the walls and some get borne down with the sticky soot. The spiders abandon their webs. Shook trot through Shenroos’ solid body. Shenroos feels the added weight of hundreds, but the air does not move with the breath of lungs, the rooms do not heat with the warmth of blood. Pigtails can almost see him when Shenroos concentrates on her and calculates, in his head, the weight of a lost soul.

Ghosts are crying out in growing numbers. These people don’t belong to the cold hell of the moon. The moon belongs to Shenroos. Soot is caked in Shenroos’ hands. It coats the inside of his mouth and nostrils.

Another flicker, gout of soot; the dead astronaut rides by, empty sockets expectant. The living astronaut pulls himself away from the walls.

Shook track their quarry by their blood.

Warmth comes in the waves of soot. Tiny flakes of ash fall from the ceiling like snow, ghosts cluster like fog where the shook gather them. What is the purpose of Draftyhouse?

Pigtails is here, standing next to him, near the lunar terminal, where the crackling room is. Shenroos kicks open the cabinet doors, drags the carcass out with a cloud of flies and a scattering of shed maggots. The shook notice, but don’t seem to care.

It would be too easy. Shenroos holds out his hand in front of the spectral muzzle of the dead astronaut’s mount. The shook draws back.

“Bite me. Poison and follow me. Lead these people home. They don’t belong here.”

The dead astronaut shakes his head.

“This is my house, and I want you all out.”

Shenroos reads lips. It’s harder when they aren’t much more substantial than the translucent teeth beneath them.

“Shut the door.”

Shenroos opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. “They’ll just open it somewhere else,” he says, but those are the words that convince him. Somewhere else. Not here.

“So be it,” Shenroos says. “You know the way home, across the Bridgeway?”

No response.

“This is why Draftyhouse isn’t open to the public.” Shenroos grabs a broken slat, ancient wood splintered and sharp.

It takes him a few tries. Even with the ghosts and the shook and new arrivals coming, a few tries. But Shenroos is an astronaut; he splashes his blood across the threshold, the place where the moon and the earth meet. He stares at the wound in his wrist, throws the slat across the threshold to earth, to the long hallway lined with gaunt men, likenesses of the astronauts who first took rockets in the long ago to place the beacons for the Bridgeways on the moon.

Shenroos puts on his gloves. The left fills with blood, but it stays inside the suit, where it won’t mislead the shook herding the ghosts off the moon. The dead astronaut remains.

“You can stay. I’ll see you here when the big door closes, if you do.”

Shenroos is a lucky man; the Draftyhouse belongs to him and always will. He is the man on the moon. Shenroos puts on his helmet and heads for the airlock doors.

About the Author

Erik Amundsen has been removed from display for being zoologically improbable and/or terrifying to small children. He has been sighted in Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Not One of Us and Jabberwocky but his natural habitat is central Connecticut.

The Womb Factory

Peter M. Ferenczi

Mei stood, hand on her swollen belly. Her stomach rumbled with the hunger that woke her each morning. Four steps took her and her burden to the window, which slid up scant centimeters before hitting bolts ensuring it went no further. The opening allowed air into the room, but no girl, not even Nuan with her misshapen skull, could have fit her head through the slot. The nets to discourage jumping, installed when the industrial park was a city unto itself and the window bolts hadn’t yet been added, hung in tatters at the first story.

Mei put her face sideways to the opening. The breeze that morning carried the chemical tang of Shantou away from her, and the air smelled relatively pure.

The bell for first breakfast, second group, rang in the corridor, and Mei heard the bustle of girls emerging from their rooms though her thin door. Eight short steps took her into the line shuffling in slippers towards the eating room at the end of the hall.

The attendant, in her white uniform with the brown stain Mei had noticed a week ago, stood at the door. As the girls filed by, she touched the front edge of a tablet against their bellies. In most cases, the tablet chirped. The attendant would fish around a multi-pocketed pack at her thick waist and wordlessly hand over a small plastic disk.

Mei accepted the press of the tablet against the bulge under her smock with downcast eyes. Nothing good came of antagonizing the attendants, she’d quickly learned. The tablet chirped, corresponding with the thing inside her.

When she’d first arrived, before they put the egg inside her, the tablet had been silent, and the attendant had given her a white disk. This morning she got a purple one. It had been red at dinner the night before.

She entered the room, with its light green peeling paint, the single long table and bench seats. She took her disk to a low window in one wall and slid it across the counter there. A hand snatched it and a tray emerged with a purple bowl full of the usual gelatinous substance, something that tasted vaguely like congee. It came with a spoon and a cup of weak tea.

Mei took her breakfast and moved toward her end of the table, where the misfit girls clustered like a flock of awkward sheep. She sat next to chubby Fen Hua, who was attacking a bowl with her habitual total focus—she seemed to be the only girl whose body refused to relinquish its fat stores to the thing growing inside it. Crooked, simple Nuan mechanically spooned food into her mouth a little farther down, the occasional drop falling back into the bowl for recycling.

As Mei began to bury her hunger under the glop, a new girl sat down across from her. Mei had noticed that many new arrivals gravitated to her end of the table, perhaps sensing the lack of threat. Most graduated out to one clique or another soon after.

She looked very young, skinny in the shapeless gown they all wore. Her face was pale and her posture telegraphed fear.

Mei kept her gaze averted. She didn’t need to talk to the newcomer to know her story. She would be from a small village somewhere in the provinces surrounding Shantou. Her family would have faced privations, debts, deaths caused by flu and/or the domino fall of diseased crops.

A man would have appeared in the village, driving a clean truck. He would have had tea with the girl’s father or eldest brother and discussed something in low, urgent tones. And depending on the particulars of her family, her father or brother would have looked at her with calculating or desperate eyes. She would not likely see the sheaf of bills that passed from one hand to another. There would be a tearful parting, or not.

There were no tears when the man offered to take away the extra mouth that had befallen Mei’s uncle. She was the troublesome daughter of his city-living brother who’d died, along with his wife, during the flu season two years earlier.

“I will keep your share for you, for when you are finished,” he told her in farewell.

She knew he lied, but in her ignorance was cautiously excited to escape the resentfulness of his family, to make her own way. That feeling didn’t last long.

The new girl was still frozen in front of her bowl. Mei was halfway through her own.

“You should eat,” she said in a low voice, modulated to just carry over the murmur of conversation in the room. The attendants didn’t like a ruckus.

The girl didn’t seem to hear.

Mei nudged her slippered foot under the table. The girl’s vacant stare shifted up from the bowl. Mei pointedly shoved the western-style spoon into the mush and brought it to her mouth.

“Eat,” she said.

The girl hesitantly began to eat from her small, white bowl. It was the kind for newcomers and girls in their rest period, formulated to feed one, not two.

“It’s not so bad, see?”

She got no answer.

Back in her room, Mei settled herself in her chair. It was hard compared to the one in her old bedroom, but it was better than anything in her uncle’s small hut, with its thin mats on a packed earth floor. Sitting made her gravid state a little more bearable.

She turned on her tablet and listlessly flicked through the games. The attendants called the tablets a privilege, but Mei intuited that without them, the girls’ crushing boredom could become a problem for the operation.

In her case, the thing wasn’t much help anyway. She didn’t even bother with the video selection, mostly ridiculous state-approved soap operas. The games never changed. She settled on go and placed virtual stones on the board as the app’s limited AI tried to outwit her.

A car door slamming pulled her out of the game: comings and goings were rare for the derelict dorm complex. She went to her window and looked down at the cracked parking lot that fronted the building, sensed other girls in other rooms doing the same.

It was the bright orange Changfeng that appeared every two weeks or so. The usual young man, wearing dark augmented sunglasses and a leather jacket, carrying a small white and blue cooler. He trotted up to the entrance of the building, batting aside a skein of netting. Faintly, she heard him speaking into the intercom.

In the girls’ unchanging world, the young man’s arrival always inspired discussion—his appearance, his purpose, his eligibility. None had ever seen him closer than from their high windows in the otherwise empty building, but most had theories about his personality and his attitudes towards the princesses locked in their tower.

Mei didn’t follow their gossip. The man was an element of the factory, her enemy.

Her stomach was growling again when the bell rang for second breakfast. She knew it was the thing in her belly that absorbed all the energy, but she was the one who felt the hunger.

In the hallway, she found herself walking next to the new arrival, who surprised her by murmuring, “My name is Jia Li.”

“I’m Mei.”

They were scanned by the attendant, received their disks. Mei collected another large purple bowl, while Jia Li was given a white cup. They sat next to each other.

“It is too early for lunch,” observed Jia Li.

“There are six meals a day here. This is second breakfast,” said Mei.

Jia Li poked at the glop in the cup.

“We have not even started to work yet. Why so much food?” she asked.

Mei glanced at her.

“You don’t know what this place is.”

Jia Li stared at her cup.

“A factory.”

“A womb factory,” said Mei. From the silence, she guessed that the girl didn’t understand. “We make things inside us. Like babies, but not babies.”

Jia Li’s cup froze on the way to her mouth.

“Father said I was going to work in a factory,” she whispered.

“You are. But not with your hands.” Mei thought of the young man and his delivery. She was sure it was a new batch of eggs.

“Soon you will start. Don’t be afraid,” she said, thinking of her own terror when, ten weeks ago, the attendant had entered her room, shown her the white oblong shape and said, ‘Relax and this will be easier.’

“An attendant will put a small thing inside you. It doesn’t hurt. It will grow. In three months, the cycle will be finished, and you will rest for two weeks.” The girl would find out eventually that “rest” really meant “heal,” she thought.

“But. . . what. . . what are we making?” asked Jia Li.

“Have you heard of biobots?”

“What? No.”

“Well, it’s like a toy. But alive.”

Mei remembered the commercials she would see for something called a FurryBuddy while browsing on her tablet, when her parents were alive and the world still made sense. There was a boy, perhaps eight years old, sitting on a couch in a sunlit room. Next to him was a smaller creature, covered in golden fur, like a cross between a monkey and a dog. Its oversized brown eyes shone in a face covered with short hair. Plush-toy limbs, stubby fingers. The bottoms of its feet, visible as it sat on the couch with its legs too short to bend at the knee, had dog-like pads on them.

It held an old-fashioned book on its lap and told a story in its high-pitched voice. The child squealed with pleasure. In another scene the pair frolicked in a field. In another they walked along a sidewalk in a prosperous neighborhood, with the creature calling out in English the names of objects they passed.

She’d asked her father for one, and he’d smiled thinly.

“Those are too expensive for a professor’s salary,” he’d said. He’d ruffled her hair, as if trying to brush away her disappointment. “You’re better off using your imagination to make your dolls talk.”

Jia Li was speaking. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What is it?”

Fascinated by them, Mei had learned all that she could, even if she couldn’t own one.

“It is like an animal with a computer in its head,” she said. “It’s like a pet that talks. It plays games, teaches things, languages. . .”

“But, how can we make a computer?”

“The computer, they put inside us. We grow the animal around it.”

Jia Li digested that.

“Then it goes to school to be a teacher?”

Mei pictured a classroom full of the furry creatures and couldn’t suppress a grim smile.

“No, the important stuff is already in its computer.”

Back in the room, playing games, waiting for the lunch bell. Her attention wandered, as it often did, back to the tablet itself. It looked just like the one the attendants had, but only ran a few programs, distractions for the girls. There was, of course, no Internet access, no way to get messages out. Not that most of the girls would make a stink even if they could—any trouble would quickly find their families, which might mean that they had nowhere to return to at the end of their two-year contract.

Mei didn’t care too much about that.

The tablet was tantalizingly similar to one she’d been issued in school. It, too, had been restricted to certain functions, but plenty of kids knew that pushing an unfolded paperclip through a small hole in the back of the device while holding down two buttons made the tablet ask for an unlock code: because the school had never changed it, it was “00000.” Then you could play all the games you wanted.

If Mei could unlock this tablet, she had imagined a thousand or more times, she could do something other than play games. Maybe she could reach out for help.

She was certain that the operation was illegal. Real biobots like FurryBuddies were made in fancy bioengineering factories by big companies, not by little groups of girls hidden in abandoned worker dormitories. But it must be cheaper to grow something almost as good in people, just like the phones made in illegal backcountry factories were almost as good as the ones made by the big brands.

The problem was that this tablet wasn’t quite like Mei’s old school-issued device: it had no pin hole in the back. She’d tried every possible combination of button presses, but all she’d managed to do was freeze the tablet a dozen times. If there was a workaround, it would be online—meaning it might as well be carved on the dark side of the moon.

She was trapped by the lack of some trivial thing, and that lack would cost her two years in this place.

A sudden fury uncoiled in her chest. Before she realized what she was doing, her hand swept the tablet off her lap. As it spun through the air, she was seized by a child’s terror. She was misbehaving, and she would be punished.

But by the time it clattered to a stop on the linoleum floor, she’d mastered the feeling. She was already in hell. Whatever this exercise of will cost her, she would pay it.

She tottered over to the dark tablet, stooped with a grunt, and picked it up. The casing flexed and she saw that the front and back halves had come loose in the impact. At least the screen wasn’t cracked.

She was about to try snapping the split halves back together when a thought froze her. There had been no hole for the paper clip. Now, there was a hole of a sort.

Gently, she pried the two halves further apart, until the back suddenly popped free. Inside was the usual green plastic with metallic traceries, a gray block that was likely the battery.

And right where the hole in the case of her school-issued tablet had been was a tiny white circle. She pressed on it with her finger nail and it clicked in. Release, and it popped back out. The paperclip switch.

The lunch bell rang.

Mei mechanically packed the food paste into her mouth, trying to speed up time. She hadn’t felt hope like this since. . . she blinked. Since before her parents got sick. Part of her tried to rein in that feeling, but it was impossible.

She looked up, and realized that Jia Li had asked her a question.

“What?” She didn’t mean to sound irritated, but knew she did. The other girl looked down.

“I was just wondering why we have to spend so much time alone. In our rooms,” she said softly.

“Oh. It has to do with the eggs. They can connect to things from inside us, like what happens with the tablet when the attendant checks you in for a meal. They keep us apart so that they don’t interfere with each other.” Mei had overheard this from girls who had been there longer, and it seemed believable as anything.

“It’s lonely,” said Jia Li.

“It’s better than having to deal with that lot,” said Mei, cutting her eyes toward the other end of the table.

“They aren’t nice?”

“Well, they can be pretty mean to Nuan there, or fat Fen Hua. And if you aren’t careful, they may decide they don’t like you, either,” said Mei, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“And you? Why don’t they like you?”

“Can’t you hear the city in my accent? They can, and that’s all the reason they need.”

But she knew that wasn’t all of it. The others seemed to accept that this place was their lot, that it was what their families needed of them. Sure, they had been scared, but for the most part they’d settled into it, made friends.

But Mei couldn’t. She could try to help Jia Li understand what was happening, but she couldn’t relax and make small talk about something else. In her mind, this was an ongoing violation, and pretending otherwise would be acquiescing to it. So the others mocked her city background, but she knew that was just shorthand for their resentment of her resentment.

Jia Li didn’t say anything for a while, and Mei half figured she’d decided against aligning herself with a pariah and was plotting her way into the safety of a clique. But she finally spoke.

“Well, they must be quite stupid.”

Mei couldn’t help but smile.

After the eternity of first lunch, the door was closed behind her again. She carefully took up the tablet, and lifted the back cover away. Pursing her lips, she held down the two buttons on the front and pressed the little circular switch.

The screen went blank. The China Telecom logo came up. And then a dialog for entering an unlock code.

Holding her breath, Mei touched the “0″ key on the onscreen keyboard five times. The screen blanked for a moment, then came back. . . unchanged. The same request for a code. Failure.

A harsh bark of frustration escaped her throat and she stared unbelievingly at the screen. She had been sure. It had to work. And it had not.

I can guess it, she thought, it’s only five numbers. . . but she knew she couldn’t. After a few tries, the tablet would lock itself entirely, become useless.

Mei took a deep breath. There was a number. If it wasn’t random, she had a chance of figuring it out. But she was still clueless when the bell for second lunch rang.

First dinner. Second dinner. A night of twisting dreams and fragile sleep. She woke once to screams leaking from the delivery room: one of the girls in the chair. She briefly wondered who, then realized she didn’t care and drifted back into nightmares before the sounds stopped.

First breakfast. Second breakfast. First lunch. The bells, the bowls, newly unendurable.

I let myself hope, she thought. So much worse than not having hoped at all.

She was peripherally aware that Jia Li was sitting next to her. Had asked a question. She tapped Mei’s shoulder softly, which stirred memories of tentative taps during other recent meals. As then, Mei fixed her with a flat stare, wanted to say they could talk later, but speaking seemed far too difficult. She turned back to her food, and Jia Li remained silent.

“. . .number. . .”

The word landed on Mei’s mind like a leaf on water, drifting out of context. She shook herself alert. A conversation down the table. Two girls, part of the clique headed by Ai Bao. Mei’s concentration bored into their words, barely audible above the murmur of conversation in the room.

“He must have connections,” said the first girl.

“Or money.”

“Or both!”

“How much do you think a car like that costs?”

It sounded like gossip about the young man with the Changfeng. But could it be linked. . .? She turned to the girls.

“Excuse me, what number were you just talking about?”

The pair turned and glared, and Mei realized that in her excitement she’d stepped out of place.

Ai Bao noticed.

“Hey city girl,” she said with quiet venom, “our business isn’t yours.”

Mei looked down, choking on her frustration, her heart hammering. In her peripheral vision, she saw Jia Li stand with her tray and walk down toward the other girls.

“Can I sit with you?” Mei heard her say. “I’m from Yangtouqui.” A village tiny enough that Mei had never heard of it.

“My cousin married a man from Bianshan, not far away,” said one of the girls.

“I know it, I have an aunt who lives there,” said Jia Li. “Who is he?”

Mei, now ignored by the other girls, stared at her bowl and struggled to keep back tears. She had been alone before, and now she was again. She should get used to it.

Meal times flashed by. She’d tried “12345″ on the tablet but didn’t dare guess again.

She was getting green bowls now, meaning she was due within two weeks. She’d known despair when her parents died, but this was different, open-ended, extending to the horizons of her being.

It had been four days since her failure to guess the code when Jia Li again sat next to her at first breakfast.

“The number they spoke of is the license plate of the Changfeng that comes here,” she said. “It is a very auspicious number. They think he must have bribed someone, a lot, to have gotten it.”

The droning static of hopelessness in Mei’s mind was suddenly quiet.

“Do you know it?”

“They say it is A99988. Though they also say in a week, he should be back again.” With more eggs.

Mei looked at Jia Li, her face flushing as she realized how unfairly she had discounted the girl.

“Thank you. Thank you.”

“It woke you up. I guessed it was important. Why?”

Mei hesitated, not wanting to give hope and then take it away.

“It could be useful,” she said quietly. “I’ll tell you more when I can.”

Jia Li nodded. Mei noticed that her bowl was now blue, no longer white.

“The attendant came to you. . .”

“Yes.”

“Are you. . .?”

“I didn’t like it. But there are many things I don’t like,” said Jia Li. “Ai Bao, for example, is cruel. Her friends are frightened. But you are angry. That is better, for being here.”

“Maybe. But it’s hard.”

“I know.”

Back in her room, Mei keyed in 99988. The tablet’s start page flashed up, offering many more options than before. She shook with excitement, and felt an extra thrill as she saw the local and wide area connectivity icons at the top of the screen. . . but it began to waver as they remained transparent. No connection. Jiggering settings didn’t help.

She took a deep breath. She wouldn’t accept that her progress had been towards a dead end. She tried the browser, the various pre-installed messaging apps, but always ended up at the same error message: “No Internet connection found, please check settings and try again.”

She felt despair hovering around her, waiting for her to weaken so that it could retake her.

Almost idly, not allowing herself to consider the death of hope, she browsed through the rest of the newly available apps. Mostly, it was basic stuff—the usual calendar and note-taking kind of thing. But then she found an unusual subfolder.

Brightleaf Biomanagement.

She worked straight through the first night. The applications were configuration interfaces for biobots. At first they seemed impossibly complicated, but by poring over the help and scrutinizing the embedded tutorials, she built a rudimentary understanding. She became adept at identifying what she could ignore so she could focus on the relevant elements.

At first breakfast, Jia Li looked at her with concern.

“You seem tired. . . is it. . .?”

Mei smiled, and Jia Li hesitantly smiled back.

“I’m tired, but it’s OK. It’s not that that’s keeping me awake. It’s. . .”

She wanted to tell her everything, how she’d figured out that the tablets were linking to the biobots in the girls, fine tuning their development. How Mei could now interact with the thing inside her, could control some aspects of it. But with the attendants, the other girls, who knew what ears listening, she couldn’t. She shook her head.

“Insomnia. It’s just something that happens to me sometimes.”

The day seemed to move in fast-forward. She buried herself in the programming apps, and during meals her mind churned furiously over the latest setback, often finding a solution by the time she finished eating.

Jia Li sat next to her at each meal. The two exchanged brief smiles, but her new friend seemed otherwise content to let Mei focus inward, and she was grateful for it.

At second dinner, Mei noticed that Jia Li was among the last to arrive. She looked pale.

“Hey, are you OK?” she asked.

“I don’t feel too good.”

“If you’re really sick, you can tell the attendant,” said Mei. “But don’t bother her if you don’t need to, you know.”

Jia Li nodded. “I’ll see. Maybe.”

Mei turned to her food, let her mind drift back to programming problems.

That night she fell asleep while working with her tablet, and woke with a start in her chair. She rubbed her eyes, disoriented, with the vague sense that she’d heard something.

Then a girl’s scream echoed in the corridor. It froze her, sent her pulse racing. She heard the murmur of voices as well, receding, and sobbing. More screams, now muffled behind the delivery room door. She wondered whose turn it was, and the dinner table with its colored bowls flashed in her mind’s eye. She tried to visualize who had a yellow bowl, the last color. She couldn’t.

Mei didn’t realize she was looking for Jia Li until the door to the dining room closed. The last girls were getting their trays. Jia Li wasn’t among them. Nor was she further down the table. Mei craned her neck, just to be sure.

Maybe she overslept, since she had been sick. Maybe they let her stay in her room.

She looked up from her bowl to see Nuan staring at her from across the table. The shy, slow girl looked down, but Mei kept watching her, and after a few seconds she looked up again.

“The white truck came last night,” she said softly in her nasal voice.

“What?” There was a white truck that dropped off supplies sometimes, but Mei had never seen it come at night.

“At night, it takes girls,” said Nuan.

Mei felt ice run down her spine.

“What do you mean?”

“It hears the screaming, sometimes. It comes.”

Mei couldn’t speak. A bit farther down the table, Fen Hua had stopped chewing.

“Some girls get sick from the egg,” Fen Hua muttered to her bowl. “Makes bad problems. Screaming. They go. Nobody sees.”

Mei took a shuddering breath, then plunged her spoon back into her bowl. She forced her mind back to the programs, felt like she walked a tightrope over despair.

When her time came, it was bad. As she was led to the reclined chair with its stirrups, she was seized by an image of Jia Li writhing there in agony, her body rejecting the thing that had successfully taken hold in Mei’s womb.

Then the pain drove the image away, but it couldn’t dispel the sense of her body out of her control, enslaved to this creature that now wanted out and demanded her participation. And out it eventually came.

She kept her eyes squeezed shut as the attendant cut the cord. She heard its first mewling squeals, high pitched like a kitten’s. A morbid curiosity opened her eyes and she glimpsed it as the attendant carried it away, much smaller than a human baby, wriggling and pink and red.

It was bad. But it would have been so much worse without the knowledge that she’d made her mark on the little beast, that it was in a way her servant as well.

“Would you like to hear a story?” asked Doodles.

It had been a week since Karin’s mother had bought her the creature, in one of the little shops down on Canal. It was cute, but despite its soft, warm fur and the fact that it could speak, there was something about it that made her uncomfortable. Watching it daintily opening a pack of the dense, hard biscuits that it ate, the fact that they had to leave a bathroom door ajar because it couldn’t reach the knob, the bottle of antibacterial gel it fastidiously used next to the toilet. . . it was like having a pet that was also a house guest. Yet it seemed to have less personality than her cat Sandy—it was too chipper, too much like the annoying guide AIs that popped up alongside new apps to “help” you use them.

It wasn’t even a real FurryBuddy, though Karin didn’t have the heart to tell her mom that. It was glitchy, sometimes spouting garbled nonsense or freezing in place for a minute or more before popping back to life as if nothing had happened.

But sometimes the stories were fun. Weird fairy tales, or stuff about monsters and aliens. It was as if someone had just dumped the text of a bunch of old books into the thing’s memory—which was actually pretty likely, given its knock-off status, she thought. As it told the stories, its emphasis and pauses were sometimes off, its body language often out of sync, but not enough to ruin them.

“OK,” said Karin.

Doodles nodded, but it seemed to pause longer than usual before saying, “This story is in a Cantonese dialect. Would you like me to translate it into English?”

“Uh, sure.”

The creature smiled vacantly and swayed gently back and forth, a sign that Karin knew meant the computer in its head was chewing over something.

Then it stopped moving and looked at her. Karin had never seen the expression it wore before: flat, no hint of a smile, eyes hooded rather than brightly wide. It began to speak in an affectless voice, arms at its sides, staring straight at her.

“Hello. My name is Mei Feng. I made this toy. I did not want to. This is my story. . .”

About the Author

Peter M. Ferenczi has written extensively about technology for national magazines and the web, sometimes as a cheerleader, sometimes as a catcaller and concerned citizen of the world. He writes speculative fiction in the hope that he may infect others with the bone-deep reading addiction thats plagued him since he resolved the alphabet into words.

Born in California, he’s drifted east, living in North Carolina, New York, England, and now France. Along the way he acquired a couple of degrees, a love of photography and a taste for travel. He lives in Paris with his wife.

The Latest Apocalypse: Popular Music and the End of the World

Brian Francis Slattery

American popular culture—science fiction and otherwise—feasted on the Cold War’s stew of paranoia, incessant competition couched in terms of progress, and threat of mutually assured destruction right up until the tension could, without a doubt, be declared over with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. In retrospect, it’s pretty amazing that Soviet-phobic films like The Day After (1983) and Red Dawn (1984) got made when they did. In the ’80s the Soviet Union wasn’t nearly the threat that it had once been. By the time the U.S.S.R. was in obvious decline, we’d been treated to four decades of apocalypse and post-apocalypse, in movies, television, books, and even music. Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”— the 1954 song often credited with putting rock ‘n’ roll on the map—was first issued as the B-side to “Thirteen Women (and Only One Man in Town),” which tells the story of a man who has a dream similar to what happens to Burgess Meredith’s bookworm bank-teller in the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last,” except that instead of books he’s left with after the bomb drops, it’s women. And his glasses don’t break.

Just in case you’re the last person on earth who doesn’t know what a double entendre is, the music of “Thirteen Women” clues you in to what the lyrics are talking about: The saxes are swinging, the fingers are snapping, and the guitar makes catcalls. Not to be outdone, Dinah Shore re-recorded the song with a Cuban pulse as “Thirteen Men,” and Ann-Margaret recorded Dinah’s version as a cocktail number. Also equating the split atom with sex (and also from 1954) is Fay Simmons’s “You Hit Me Like an Atomic Bomb.” In addition to its flagrant metaphors, it has one of the most shameless—read: shamelessly terrific—organ parts ever heard. By 1957, the metaphor had been used often enough that it started to get kind of meaningless. The Five Stars’ “Atom Bomb Baby” of that year uses the couplet “Atom bomb baby, little atom bomb / I want her in my wigwam”—five times in the same song.

It’s easy to understand how the atom bomb got sexy. The musicians of the time were working in new, popular genres that were genetically engineered to party, and those artists were trying to make money. Sex sold then as well as it sells now, and people have never liked to pay for bad news. But it’s also confusing. If you’re trying not to upset people, why mention nuclear destruction at all? The reality of what nuclear war was—what it could be—was pretty fresh in 1954. Our atomic attacks on Japan were only nine years in the past. A year after that, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, an account of that city’s devastation, was a bestseller and was broadcast over the radio. Three years later the Soviet Union began testing its own nuclear weapons. People knew what was going on. So if the songs were jokes, they were dark ones, following a tradition that may have been started by Slim Galliard’s “Atomic Cocktail” in 1945.

“Atomic Cocktail” is small-combo jazz with an easy swing, the sound of skilled players relaxing in the conventions of a genre over thirty years old. And where Bill Haley is all gee-whiz-can-you-believe-my-luck energy and enthusiasm—he and the Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock” in the same studio session that produced “Thirteen Women”—underneath Galliard’s cool delivery lurk some pretty knowing, sinister lyrics: “When you see it coming, grab your suitcase / It’ll send you through the sky like airmail—BOOM—atomic cocktail.”

Issued by the record company Atomic, Inc., the record’s blood-red label features what looks a lot like an explosion on the upper half, which then sends black lines sweeping along the inside curve toward a tiny human figure on the bottom. Arms outstretched, hands up, the figure might be partying; it might also be on fire and disintegrating. The same dichotomy is in the song: The music tells you to take it easy, but the lyrics tell you to run for it. You could say “Atomic Cocktail” charted the landscape for how popular music could deal with the atom, and if Bill Haley and Fay Simmons, representing rock ‘n’ roll and lounge, went all in for the party, other artists—and other, older genres—took a look at what they thought the future might hold. And they weren’t so quick to laugh.

The fight about whether the ’50s-and-’60s folk revival was really folk—which is really a fight about what the word folk means—is never going to end. But the gist of that genre’s narrative is hard to argue with: Starting in the late ’40s, a bunch of people started to get interested in the music that poor Americans had played a generation before them. These revivalists both resuscitated that music and wrote their own songs harkening back to those styles as best they could. They shouldered for themselves the weight of history that came naturally to blues, jazz, country, and gospel, and under that heavy load, simple partying was impossible. Sarcasm wasn’t, though, as Bob Dylan’s 1963 “Talking World War III Blues” attests.

In the song, Dylan’s approach is less “Thirteen Women” and more “Atomic Cocktail”—or even The Crown City Four’s 1960 excoriating barbershop quartet-meets-marching-band cut “Watch World War Three (on Pay TV).” The conventions of an older musical genre gave Dylan the sarcastic tools he needed to approach his subject head on. But the young Dylan couldn’t escape the sheer anxiety, either. According to the liner notes for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was written in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Dylan is quoted as saying that “every line in it is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.” And Dylan, of course, was his generation’s genius—maybe the genius for multiple genres that came after him, despite his dire fortunetelling.

Folksinger Bonnie Dobson was humbler than Dylan. Still, her “Morning Dew,” also from 1962, employed the same trick as “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”: to make a serious treatment of annihilation listenable. “Morning Dew” turned out to have legs; it captured what so many people liked about the music of the folk revival and has since been recorded 32 times (and counting) by other artists, from hippies like the Grateful Dead to noiseniks like Einstürzende Neubauten. The lyrics are oblique enough that you could listen to the whole thing without knowing that it was heavily inspired by Nevil Shute’s 1957 post-apocalyptic novel, On the Beach—but Dobson is on record as saying that is indeed the case. If so, she made a smart aesthetic decision. The lyrics’ opacity is probably what saved the song. And made it a minor classic of nuclear-paranoia folk.

For a foil to “Morning Dew,” consider “Fallout Shelter,” yet again from 1962. The song is credited to Billy Chambers, who sang it. But it was written and produced by Bobby Braddock, who told Cold War-nostalgia website CONELRAD, “To be very candid, I was a musician going through serious psychological problems due to an overdose of speed at the time, and I was quite paranoid; I had tried to talk my parents into having a fallout shelter built.” He was also inspired by a Twilight Zone episode titled “The Shelter,” which is about a small town torn apart by a false alarm of an impending nuclear attack.

Braddock, who went on to be an immensely successful Nashville songwriter and was recently inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, now humorously disowns his work on “Fallout Shelter.” Musically, he’s being a little hard on himself. The song’s Spanish-tinged rock is reminiscent of Roy Orbison, and the music’s quite pretty. It’s the lyrics that justify Braddock’s harsh judgment. The premise is as timeless: Two teenagers want to be together, but their parents won’t let them. Tragedy ensues. That story shows up everywhere from the traditional American song “Katy Dear” to Romeo and Juliet, but somehow exporting it to the context of nuclear annihilation fails. In the song, all the bombs fall, and the narrator, a young man, begs his parents to let him bring his girlfriend with her into their fallout shelter. The parents refuse, saying there isn’t enough room for her, and the boyfriend decides to stay outside with his true love so they can die together. By the time the narrator gets to the money line—”You hold my hand, I understand / The sickness has begun / And if we live or if we die / Our hearts will beat as one”—you’ve probably checked out. Braddock, working in what was then a new flavor of rock and country, couldn’t get at the terror of the subject without putting people off. It was more weight than the young musician—and a young music—could bear.

The straight-up country music of the Cold War era though, knew exactly what to do. It had deep roots in Appalachian ballads and hymns, and it had been viable commercial music since the ’20s. In 1927, The Carter Family sang that “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, but fire next time,” so for country musicians, writing about atomic power was easy. Next time meant now. Hawkshaw Hawkins’s 1947 song “When They Found the Atomic Power” understands the A-bomb as a divine sign that we’d better stop fighting. The Buchanan Brothers’ “Atomic Power” from 1946 considers Little Boy and Fat Man—the codenames of the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945—as “brimstone fire,” judging that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki paid a big price for their sins.” But lest we think the United States is off the hook for fiery repentance, there’s Fred Kirby’s “When the Hell Bomb Falls.” That song, like Hank Williams’s “When the Fire Comes Down” and Jim Anglin’s “This World Can’t Stand Long,” implicates all of us: “He gave us all this blessed land, and this I cannot understand / A weapon of destruction to destroy us, everyone.”

According to country music’s diagnosis, we’re all in trouble. The Buchanans, however, make a pretty interesting last move in “Atomic Power” that starts to get past even the cohesive narrative of atomic power as God’s wrath: “But on that day of judgment when comes a greater power,” they sing, “we will not know the minute and we’ll not know the hour.” That’s where gospel picks up, and gospel has some even deeper sources to tap. By 1945, gospel as a marketed genre was over twenty years old. And like country music it had stayed relatively close to its roots in spirituals, which went back a few centuries. The tradition encompasses and draws strength from a history of unbelievable hardship, including the Middle Passage and the immense, horrific legacy of slavery.

That perspective makes “Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb” a pretty unique thing. It began life as a country song, written by Lee McCollum. As recorded by Lowell Blanchard and the Valley Trio in 1950, it’s a bit of a novelty number, easy to take none too seriously. But gospel groups latched onto it and made it theirs. The Soul Stirrers—which would include a pre-fame Sam Cooke over the years—recorded it the same year. Then the Pilgrim Travelers did it in 1951. Both of them changed the song’s tone, from jokey to celebratory, from declamatory to comforting. In doing so, they turned the country narrative about the atomic bomb inside out. For them, the threat of nuclear war isn’t a big deal; like the Buchanans suggest, it’s the Second Coming that we really need to watch out for. But where the Buchanans see menace, the gospel singers see hope. They’re looking forward to the day Jesus brings them home, and they accomplish in two lines what all the other above-mentioned songs never quite do: They defuse the bomb.

“Jesus Hits,” in the hands of gospel musicians, transcends the bomb’s threat of complete annihilation. Yeah, it’s bad, gospel says. But gospel has seen bad. And its audience—which has been wronged, over and over, and carries the wisdom of that from generation to generation—has already seen a catastrophe or two. They’ve already witnessed the ruination of peoples, nations, and continents. Rock ‘n’ roll tries to go crazy and party that away. Country tells us to be afraid for what we’ve done. Jazz tells us to take it easy; there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. But “Jesus Hits” goes further. It tells us that nuclear war is just the latest apocalypse; when the threat of it subsides, there will be another apocalypse waiting. And the biggest one is always coming, until the world really ends and begins again.

The gospel singers were right. For all the decades of obsession with nuclear annihilation—which shaped everything from politics to science fiction to music—after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the threat of death from atomic weapons turned out to have been a false alarm. But it’s too easy to make that point now, in hindsight. Maybe it’s possible to render the threat of global thermonuclear war quaint because it had a single cause—the U.S.S.R.—compared to our current era of multiple catastrophes: terrorism, economic hardship, political chaos, climate change.

Culturally speaking, it’s hard now to point the finger, to color the map, to place what’s going on into a tidy context that makes it all easier to understand. But we can feel it. We see it in the news. We absorb it from books, the movies, TV, and, yes, music. And maybe all the worry is justified; on some level we comprehend what’s up, even if we can’t articulate it as a coherent concept or give it a name. But maybe we’re missing the signs of something bigger that pulls it all together—signs, perhaps delivered in song form, that will seem obvious generations from now. If that future comes, will we wonder why we worried so much about everything else? And what will we listen to then?

About the Author

Brian Francis Slattery is a freelance editor, musician, and author of Spaceman Blues, Liberation, and the newly released Lost Everything, completing a kind of trilogy about what happens when everything collapses. He lives with his family outside of New Haven, Connecticut.

Passing Through Each Other:
A Round-Table Discussion of Speculative Fiction and Academia

Jeremy L. C. Jones

What do Julianna Baggott and Paul Levinson have in common? Or, how about James Enge and Joan Slonczewski? Nnedi Okorafor and Brian Evenson? Ekaterina Sedia and Jeffrey Ford? For one thing, they all write speculative fiction and they all teach at a college or university.

Below, these eight authors discuss the interrelationship of speculative fiction and academia from the point of view of writer/professors. The questions I posed to them grew out of my work at Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that I co-founded with Jeff VanderMeer at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. Shared Worlds, in turn, grew out of my having used speculative fiction in a high school English class and seeing how powerful an effect it had on students.

Yet, as historian W. Scott Poole, a professor at the College of Charleston and the author of Monsters in America, points out, “Speculative fictions are seldom seen as a central part of a traditional liberal arts curriculum. In fact, such works tend to be relegated to special topics courses in [English departments], seen as the special province of those, usually, postmodern leaning profs, who jump back and forth across the line between popular and so-called ‘High Culture.’”

My experiences as an adjunct professor in higher education are similar to those mentioned by Poole. At the three colleges where I have taught, I have met numerous colleagues who read speculative fiction, a few who teach it, and one that writes it. But I also have been told, in essence, “We don’t teach that here.”

However, Poole suggests that “[s]peculative fiction and higher education share some of the same goals. Both build worlds. Both are amalgams of art and science that endeavor to open up the mysteries of nature, history and culture by hypothesizing speculative universes of meaning.”

I bet that many of the professors and administrators involved in Shared Worlds might agree with Poole on that!

As a student, I was lucky. My undergraduate creative writing teacher, Madison Smartt Bell, told me point blank, “Read anything and everything. It will all teach you something.” In workshops, he never balked at speculative stories.

Similarly, in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, no one ever forbade me from writing or discussing speculative fiction. Yet, I do not remember ever discussing speculative fiction or reading any speculative fiction manuscripts in workshops. Even so, a few years after graduating from the program, my close friend and classmate, Robert V. S. Redick, sold an epic fantasy trilogy, The Chathrand Voyage, to Gollancz (UK) and Del Rey (US).

(When we were in school, I didn’t even know he read fantasy, let alone write it. I don’t think he was hiding a “dirty secret” . . . it just never came up.)

In what follows, eight authors talk about the purpose of higher education and the purpose of speculative fiction. They brush on the topics of snobbery, technology, the future of education, and what happens when everyone plays well together. I find the topics infinitely fascinating, in no small part because I live, somewhat, in both worlds and find myself crossing their perceptual borders on a regular basis. And crossing borders is never a simple matter.

All in all, I very much agree with Nnedi Okorafor when she says, “It’s a complicated thing for me.”

What is the purpose of higher education? What is the purpose of speculative fiction? In what ways do the two purposes coincide and/or collide?

Julianna Baggott: Higher education should both broaden the worldview and prepare students for the future. Speculative fiction looks into the future and primarily tells cautionary tales, even when describing utopias. So they collide in their lens set on the future, in some ways. Should they collide in the classroom for every student? No. Speculative fiction is one of many ways of looking toward the future. I think one extremely important way of looking to the future is learning the past, for example, carrying that past with you into the future.

James Enge: I wouldn’t say anything as broad-based as higher education has a single purpose. For many, it’s job training for certain types of career. This may be the least interesting part of a university education to some observers, but it’s always been there: the medieval universities existed to grant people degrees in law and medicine, among other things. And with the hideous cost of an undergraduate education in the USA these days, these practical questions need to be addressed. What is a college education for? Is it worth the price to the people who are buying it?

But I’d say that, essentially, a university exists to preserve, increase and extend the cultural legacy. SFF is part of the cultural legacy, so their purposes are not necessarily in conflict.

Universities are institutions, though, and art doesn’t necessarily flourish in institutions. Think of the relationship between a bug-collector and bugs. The bug-collector has an intense and particular interest in capturing and studying bugs—cutting them up, mounting them on cards, working on them in labs, etc. But the bug may be more interested in just surviving and being a bug.

Brian Evenson: For me, higher education should be able to provide students with a series of tools that make critical thinking possible. I don’t think it should be about the dissemination of knowledge (or if so only secondarily), nor is it about establishing a particular worldview, nor about positioning oneself in a particular way in regard to employment or a field. At its best [higher education] provides tools for thinking and teaches students how to use them in a way that allows for unexpected and sometimes startling results. I think speculative fiction is a place in which that critical thinking is brought to bear in a very unique and particular way, in which imagined worlds and imagined models end up allowing us to t-hink about our own world in a particular way, but also allow us to approach philosophical and ethical questions differently, and sometimes with a great deal more clarity. I don’t see that as a purpose exactly, but more as a mode. I think at their best, both higher education and speculative fiction dovetail into each other. They collide at moments when higher education becomes too insistent on doing something other than providing a series of tools and begins telling people exactly how those tools should be used. It’s particularly problematic when higher education becomes a kind of gatekeeper for maintaining the status quo and keeping certain genres and ideas “in their place.”

Jeffrey Ford: Higher education teaches you how to answer questions; speculative fiction teaches you how to ask them. They don’t so much collide as pass through each other.

I’ve met a lot of teachers, administrators, students who were SF/F/H readers. A lot of the teachers use speculative works (film and text) in their classes. In a college writing class I taught for students with learning disabilities, I decided I was going to show them a film and have them write a review of it. This student, Antony, volunteered to bring in a movie. I was leery of this. Antony, although never malicious, acted a little wacky at times.

I told him, “Nothing too out there.”

“I got a good one,” he said.

The next week he brought in the movie and handed me the DVD case. I couldn’t believe it. He picked Eyes Wide Shut by Kubrick. My first thought was I’d have been better off if he’d brought in Hostel. Some of the students in that class couldn’t sit still for 15 minutes at a time. Forget three hours plus of sturm und drang. I could just picture how long they’d put up with Cruise emoting before they revolted. I saw the flick in the theater when it came out and thought it was confusing and slow; a big fizzle. I didn’t have anything else to show, though, so I put it on and settled in.

From the minute it came on, you could hear a pin drop. They were so engrossed by it that it kind of spooked me at first. Then I somehow started seeing it the way they were and got into it. Even that stuff in the mansion at the end, the corny chanting, the naked women in masks, the old dudes in robes, seemed to work. It was deep.

When it was over, we discussed it and they were full of insights about what to mention in their reviews. I couldn’t figure out what had happened. More than a few of them described the movie as “Like a fairy tale.” Others, “Like a dream.” I never saw the film as a speculative piece, but that was their portal into it. Something weird transpired in that classroom. The intersection of speculative fiction and education. Don’t ask me to quantify it. I’ve since seen the film again a couple times on cable, and both times it bored the crap out of me.

Paul Levinson: Some of my critics have said that my scholarly work about the evolution of media is fiction, and my science fiction has so much philosophy and media theory that it reads like a scholarly tract. But that aside: The purpose of higher education is to imbue knowledge and means of learning, with entertainment being a good appetizer and dessert for that. And the purpose of speculative fiction is to entertain, with imparting a thirst for knowledge as a significant chaser. The two therefore have a lot in common. They collide only in the minds of the intellectually rigid and feeble.

Ekaterina Sedia: I would guess that the purposes of the two are mostly orthogonal to each other, not to mention that the purposes are perceived very differently by different people. To me, higher education should be focused on providing the students with a set of higher level skills—critical thinking, information synthesis and integration, along with the usual acquisition of facts and perspectives. For speculative fiction—I wouldn’t say that its purpose is terribly different from fiction in general, since even speculative fiction is still mostly about human condition. So perhaps speculative fiction should challenge the readers by talking about people in impossible circumstances.

So I suppose one could argue that both fiction and education really are about widening and challenging the subject’s frames of references.

Joan Slonczewski: In my book The Highest Frontier, student-athletes go up to Frontera College on a space station, and discover how to save the world through science. An excellent adventure, with lots to think on—that’s the purpose of speculative fiction.

The purpose of education is to explain and to inspire. To explain how the natural world works—and to inspire students to discover new worlds. Unfortunately, much of today’s science education fails at both. Explaining things requires good storytelling, so that the student remembers how a sugar molecule breaks down and why it’s of compelling importance. Yet the average textbook makes the topic both boring and incomprehensible.

Scientists don’t realize how much of what we teach is fictional illustration, such as the ball and stick model of a molecule. If we have to teach that much story, why not teach more?

Do you encounter snobbery from either realm toward the other? If so, why do you suppose that is? And how does it manifest itself?

Julianna Baggott: I really don’t know many sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction writers. I know many academics. And, yes, there is snobbery. Not just snobbery, I get end-of-year evaluations and I’m told the kind of work of mine that my colleagues would want to see more of. My fantasy work is never suggested. Pure is not on my academic CV, and neither will be the sequels. I’m writing the Pure Trilogy—which I think of as dystopian fiction instead of falling into the strict boundaries of sci-fi—for myself. I don’t see them as part of my creative scholarship and I don’t want to put my colleagues in the situation of evaluating them for promotion. I have plenty of works that I create that fit more neatly in the academic environment.

James Enge: I haven’t gotten any snobbery from academia towards my sword-and-sorcery. Most of my colleagues at my university were unaware of my fantasy-writing until I was nominated for the World Fantasy Award a year or two ago. And a lot of people were genuinely, I think, excited by it. My novels are now proudly on display in the faculty publications display case, alongside much more serious work.

Sometimes I sense some—I don’t know what to call it—anti-snobbery from the other direction. When someone at a con learns that I teach college, they may get anxious, as if I’m about to assign them homework or give them a failing grade in Somethingorother 101.

And often I see fans waxing hysterical online about academia and its lack of respect for genre. It’s clear to me that those guys don’t have the faintest clue what they’re talking about. I would give them an A in Strawman-Fighting and an F in Reality-Dealing, if I had the power to do so.

Brian Evenson: I’ve mainly encountered it on the part of academics. It manifests sometimes as a kind of embarrassment on the part of academics that I’ve done not only “literary” work, but work that is “genre”-related. They see it as a kind of shameful secret, like a heroin-addicted uncle or something. But I love my heroin-addicted uncle. The worst was someone who felt he had to draw me aside and explain to me that I was wasting my time by not doing strictly literary work and that it would ruin my reputation. That felt intensely snobbish. Then again, lots of academics find it interesting that I cross that line and are supportive of it and me.

Jeffrey Ford: I guess somebody’s got to be a snob. As far as I’m concerned, though, they can gladly have the mantle. The position seems too stressful to me. There are so many different kinds of readers with so many different tastes that it would be a job and a half to come up with standards that might encompass all those minds in their idiosyncratic engagements with text. Less is more when it comes to standards. You’ll head for the territory if you have any sense. To be fair, Snob’s a tough job because you have to keep giving a shit long after nobody else does. How does it manifest itself? Obeisance to the Precious.

Paul Levinson: I’ve seen a touch of snobbery from both sides. In academe, it comes from a narrow view that learning has to be difficult, and too much joy in anything may make it suspect. In speculative fiction, it comes from a suspicion of anything that inhabits a classroom. In both cases, again, the snobbery is a sign of a shaky mind.

Nnedi Okorafor: I’ve encountered both. But I’ve encountered the snobbery more in academia. I think it’s because a lot of academics have not read good speculative fiction. They are basing their snobbery on cliches and stereotypes. That’s not good research. It manifests itself on syllabuses. Professors won’t put speculative novels/stories on them. It manifests itself in the absence of speculative novels/stories in the literary canon. It manifests itself in the stipulations professors impose in creative writing classes. And let’s not ignore the major literary prizes that snub their noses at speculative fiction.

Ekaterina Sedia: In my experience, some individuals from popular fiction writing circles conceive of academia as beret-wearing snobs who read Joyce just to torture themselves. This concept often co-occurs with claims of “it’s all about the story” and “I read (or write) to be entertained (or to entertain).” It seems to be a defensive reaction, claiming that SF gets no respect because of academic snobbery. Of course, it does get plenty of respect (and then stops being shelved in the genre section of the bookstore, but that’s another story). I also suspect that there are academics who look down on all sorts of popular fiction, I just haven’t met any.

Joan Slonczewski: Checking the science is an important part of assessing science fiction. But ultimately what matters is, how does the work make us think? In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the science is all a century out of date. But the essential questions he raises remain: Could the human species diverge? And would we still be human?

What’s it like when these two worlds—academia and speculative fiction—coexist? When they play well together?

Julianna Baggott: I’m sure there are universities that do embrace all of it. In fact, I’ve heard that one of our nanobiology specialists teaches science fiction at the end of his own course in the sciences. You know what helps? People like Margaret Atwood. Academics can wrap their heads around the literary importance of her work.

James Enge: SFF now has a cultural legacy long enough that it needs some tending and preservation. That’s what academia does best. Mur Lafferty wrote a brief squib a while ago (”My Problem with Classics”) about how unpleasant some of the older work in the field was for her. Blogospheric squawking ensued, but I think she raised a very real issue. Some of this older stuff, written as popular fiction and meant to speak directly to a contemporary audience, no longer works as intended because the audience has changed. The marketplace that produced this work is likely to discard it in favor of things more likely to make money nowadays. But universities provide a place for this stuff to be preserved, studied, appreciated, interpreted—independent of the harsh and shifting currents of the fiction markets.

Brian Evenson: Well, I think if you can get students past the kind of resistances that academia has developed for them between so-called serious and so-called non-serious work, the interchange can be very productive. Speculative fiction has a lot to teach students. As someone who is less interested in being considered either a literary or a genre writer and who is more interested in crossing through various territories and no man’s lands to try to find whatever it takes to make the writing as strong as it can be, I think they play exceptionally well together. I’m very Rabelasian in the way I think about influence. As a teacher of fiction writing, I try to get students to realize that everything and anything can be potentially important and useful to them.

Jeffrey Ford: A good example would be the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts held every year in Florida. I went this past year. Scholars, writers, students, and fans. Saw friends, heard some good readings, listened to some interesting academic whim-wham, drank and laughed. What more need be said. Check it out if you can.

Paul Levinson: They certainly played well together in the mind of Isaac Asimov—the best science fiction writer in history, in my view, and a professor of biochemistry. Beyond that, you have the Nobel laureate in Economics, Professor Paul Krugman, who says Asimov’s Foundation series is what inspired his work in neo-Keynesian economics. And there are the scientists—like AI-specialist Marvin Minsky, who, come to think of it, credits Asimov’s robot series as inspiration. Also, in my own life’s work, I’ve found science fiction an inspiration for a lot of my media theory, and my research in evolution and technology a great source of material for my science fiction.

Nnedi Okorafor: I am product of university creative writing programs. I discovered my skill and love for writing fiction in the first creative writing class that I took (in my sophomore year). My very first story was speculative in nature, though based on a real life moment. The fantastical elements were a result of the way that I view the world. Nevertheless, in that first class and just about every creative wring class I took after that (through two master’s degrees and a PhD), I was taught by professors who were anti-science fiction and fantasy. Let me be clear: I learned the craft of writing from professors who had no respect or understanding of science fiction or fantasy. Some of them were the best professors I ever had. It’s a complicated thing for me.

In that very first class, my professor said, “No science fiction or fantasy.” Flat out stated this. Regardless, as the years rolled by, my fiction got more and more fantastical. I took other classes where this was stated. I wasn’t bothered, offended or worried. I have a way of ignoring those kinds of rules. Those stipulations simply went in one ear and right out the other, for me. I’ve always had to write what comes to me. I can’t pick and chose. In the critical moments when I submitted the stories, I just called them “magical realism.” That made everything ok. Also, as my professors saw what I was writing, I think several of them changed their minds about science fiction and fantasy or at least made exceptions for me.

I am also a product of the Clarion Writers Workshop. I learned to openly call myself a fantasy writer at Clarion (I started writing science fiction later). I went to Clarion after I had finished my first master’s degree in journalism from Michigan State.

Somewhere along the way I learned to combine/reconcile my academic and speculative fiction sides. They’ve never been in conflict. It’s very similar to the way I have fused my Nigerian and American sides. These are two aspects (my speculative fiction and academic sides) of who I am as a writers that are necessary and vital. I cannot do without either. I take from both. I’ve learned from both.

Ekaterina Sedia: In my case, they largely coexist—my academic career is a separate entity, except for when I occasionally teach a writing course. But my literary hobby hasn’t got in a way and my colleagues have been wonderfully supportive. On the other hand, being a scientist in a real life, I can convincingly fake science for literary purposes.

Joan Slonczewski: Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of the more interesting works that I teach in my course, “Biology in Science Fiction.” Dune depicts an ecosystem in surprising detail, much of which is consistent with actual ecosystems. But there is a big hole, where do the organisms get their energy? Students get the message; and they appreciate what it means to “get something wrong.” They are also impressed by the amazing amount of ideas that Herbert imagined ahead of his time, such as global climate change, energy-harvesters, and drone warfare.

How has technology changed the way we learn?

Julianna Baggott: That’s a vast question. I’ll narrow down to something simple. Memorization isn’t as important a skill set as it once was. Those who had brains that stored information like computers were thought to be brilliant and were deeply useful. Now, people don’t have to memorize. We have to know how to access. The downside is that much of what we learn doesn’t have to burrow down deep and so it doesn’t. Our brains practice skimming and lightly retaining more than they practice deep excavation.

James Enge: In some ways a lot. I do a lot of teaching about the physical culture of the ancient world, for instance, and getting the visual evidence for that stuff in front of students used to be quite a chore. In a modern multimedia classroom, it’s almost too easy. And interactive software has been a boon for helping people develop basic skills in math and language.

In some ways, not a damn thing has changed. People have to read; they have to think about what they read; they have to talk with someone about what they’re reading and thinking. I guess it was James Garfield who described education as a log with a teacher on end and a student on the other. (Insert double entendre here.) That’s what it still is, and will always be.

Brian Evenson: I think different technologies have had a definite impact on the way we think and the way we write. I think, for instance, that computer word processing programs, which allow you to delete vast blocks of texts very quickly without leaving a record and in which you can move things from page 1 to 100 without much effort have changed the way we think about the structure and the integrity of a narrative. I think the way we text—which has become one of my chief forms of communication—and the emotional shorthand that’s developed from texting and twitter has had a serious effect on our emotions in general. That’s partly generational, and is influenced by television as well. I don’t think of it as a good or bad thing—I think of it as an inevitable thing and as a very interesting thing. The tools we use work not only outward but inward, modifying our selves even as they modify the world around us. It’s like how when you have an old car you learn all sorts of procedures and modify your behavior to make it work. You know you have to jiggle the key in a certain way to make it work, know that you should pump the gas twice before starting but not three times or it’ll flood, etc. The object teaches you to adapt to it and soon you do so without thinking about it. That’s doubly true with technologies that are connected to writing, in that they modify not only our bodies but the very structures of our thinking.

Paul Levinson: The digital revolution, which I examined most recently in my New New Media (2009), has given everyone access to increasing amounts of information from anywhere and everywhere in the world. The classroom has become, if not an afterthought, a place where knowledge increasingly obtained elsewhere can be discussed and analyzed. Of course, the same can be done, ever more easily, online.

Nnedi Okorafor: So much more information is right at our fingertips. It’s glorious. If my daughter asks me some crazy off the wall question, nine times out of ten, I can find the answer online. I can show her YouTube videos to illustrate points I’m trying to make. Sadly, this also means that just as much misinformation is also right at our fingertips. Now, people also need to learn how to read information. There are many factors to consider. The source, the timing, the type of information, the biases and agendas, etc. Learning has to be more active. Also, I think people suffer from staying inside to learn about something as opposed to going out an seeing it for themselves. Example, if you are researching grasshoppers, why not go out and catch one, as opposed to looking it up on Wikipedia?

Ekaterina Sedia: Kids no longer have to learn to visualize concepts from written descriptions? Look, I still use blackboard and chalk when I lecture, so maybe I’m not the best person to ask about technology.

Joan Slonczewski: Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker (”Get Smart,” April 4, 2011) argues that what we humans have done, for centuries, is to outsource our own intelligence. From the invention of writing and the abacus, to Deep Blue and SimOne, we build devices that do what humans do—then we define their achievement as inhuman. Whatever hurdles remain for machines to surmount, we define what remains as human—”not because it matters more but because it’s all that’s left to us.”

What will higher education be like in a hundred years? What will change and what will most likely stay the same?

Julianna Baggott: Oh, that depends on politics. Right now, those things are being chosen in legislative sessions, state by state. Some states will remain balanced and whole. Others will push solely toward degrees that get people jobs. The fact is, people create. The arts will endure. This skill set and that skill set will become obsolete; technology will continue to force great changes there. But the desire to create, to innovate and invent, to make use of our imaginations—those things will remain, but we might have to fight for them and be hungry for them for a while in certain regions.

James Enge: Higher education is likely to undergo a crisis in the near future, something like the crisis commercial publishing is experiencing now. Institutions may crumble, or adapt, but the storm is coming.

Information is now very easy to get. But the skills to use it, interpret it, understand it, make use of it: these are as elusive as they were in Socrates’ day. If institutions can provide these skills, and if people think they are worth paying for, universities will continue to exist. If not, then not.

Brian Evenson: I’m not all that convinced that America has another hundred years left in it, but I hope I’m wrong. . .

Jeffrey Ford: Forget the next hundred years. I’m more concerned with the next five years. Education is under attack. In this age of slashing budgets, education is one of the first things to go—hey, kids don’t vote. More teachers will be laid off, class sizes will increase, programs will be cut. The electorate has, through the work of the right, been convinced that education is somehow evil. The word is always that everyone wants education to be top of the line, but “we don’t want to just throw money at it.” Why not? This is what’s been done with the military for the past 60 years, at least, and we have the best military in the world. Go ahead, I say, throw money at it. That would be a good start.

To compete in the world, we’re going to need smart and imaginative people. A lot of the bullshit restraints to thinking should be lifted from education. Let’s put a stake through the heart of Creationism (dogma circumvents the need to think), or situations like the one in Tennessee where teachers would be unable to say the word “gay” in a classroom. Forget school voucher programs—they favor the well-off and do nothing for those in need. Let’s promise to build up the public education system to where it should be. Throw some money at it, so you can hire the best people. Reintroduce full-on music, art, and athletic programs. Get rid of the inanity of lock-step approaches to teaching a given course and let the experts, the teachers, choose the material and the approaches to a given curriculum. Only ignoramuses think that all courses in a given discipline should be taught the exact same way. This drive toward uniformity is a way to dis-empower teachers and make them merely mouthpieces for the status quo. Keep tenure—teachers have to be able to express a healthy disrespect for authority in order to act as an example for their students. A teacher who is limited to the status quo, and is unable to call bullshit when they readily see it, will only help to produce students who can only spout the status quo. Online education definitely can have benefits for students, but this shell game needs to be thoroughly investigated. Is it more about the students or about the bottom line? Make education not about getting a job—there’re no fucking jobs out there anyway—and more about helping young people to become imaginative free-thinkers who are capable of learning any job and have a clue as to what’s going on in the world around them. This is where the money should be going, especially now. The current grade school and high school education in this country now is basically a disgrace. Our colleges and universities are somewhat better, but they’re faculties and budgets are under attack. I’m not saying spend foolishly, or not to cut waste, but more money is needed overall. This is an investment that will pay off in the future.

I can’t think a hundred years in the future. The struggle is now. If we ignore this problem today, there won’t be an America in a hundred years.

Paul Levinson: There is something fundamental and irresistible about in-person presence—we are, after all, flesh-and-blood beings. This means that the physical classroom will endure—or at least, professors and students in the same physical space—but one hundred years into the future we’ll see much more information imparted online. And the learning online will be increasingly individual—meaning, people will study and learn what they most need—which is good, i.e., real progress.

Nnedi Okorafor: You mean after the Apocalypse? What will stay the same is that we will still need to do the work to learn. You can have all the information in the world available to you on many various gadgets and devices but you’ll still need to take it in and process it. you’ll still need to study. You will still need to think. What will change? That’s not so predictable. Things come and go. There are wild cards that no can possibly predict. I do hope touch screens go away as opposed to evolve. . . I loathe touchscreens.

Ekaterina Sedia: More administrators, fewer full-time faculty, more talk about education as product and students as customers, less quality. Oh, I’m sorry. Were you expecting something uplifting?

Joan Slonczewski: An unsettling consequence of online learning is that it makes it increasingly easy to narrow your world to those with whom you agree. For example, there is a growing fount of so-called biblical textbooks sold on the Internet. If you select their publishers—and there are many—you can feel as if you’re sampling many opinions, when in reality you never hear anything outside the circle. Which is the opposite of what happens in The Highest Frontier.

In The Highest Frontier, most of “higher education” has been outsourced to Toynet—a neural Internet device that, according to NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse, “makes the iPhone look like a Model-T Ford.” Students learn history by entering a VR world with Teddy Roosevelt, where they compare his imperialism with that of invading ultraphytes. But at Frontera, students still interact with live teachers. A new student reflects that for the first time she finds herself arguing face to face with a teacher she disagrees with—”breathing the same air.”

Julianna Baggott [www.juliannabaggott.com] is the author of Pure, The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (as Bridget Asher, and 15 other books. She is also is an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts.

James Enge [jamesenge.com] is the author of Blood of Ambrose, This Crooked Way, The Wolf Age, and the upcoming A Guile of Dragons. He’s also a lecturer in classics at Bowling Green State University.

Brian Evenson [www.brianevenson.com] is the translator of numerous works and the author of eight books, including The Open Curtain and Immobility. He is also the Chair of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

Jeffrey Ford [www.well-builtcity.com] is the author of ten books, including The Shadow Year and The Drowned Life. He also teaches literature and writing at Brookdale Community College.

Paul Levinson [paullevinson.info] is the author of more than a dozen books, including New New Media and The Plot To Save Socrates. He is also a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University.

Nnedi Okorafor [nnedi.com] is the author of six books, including Akata Witch and Iridessa and The Secret of the Never Mine. She is also a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University.

Ekaterina Sedia [www.ekaterinasedia.com] is the author of five novels, including The House of Discarded Dreams and Heart of Iron. She is also an Associate Professor of Biology at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

Joan Slonczewski is the author of seven novels, including Brain Plague and The Highest Frontier. She is also a professor of microbiology at Kenyon College.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Suitably Strange:
A Round-Table Discussion of World-Building

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Imaginary worlds offer readers a time and place that is different from the world they live in. Imaginary worlds offer a fresh perspective, a new POV—a slanted angle of vision. These settings, these places— secondary worlds or “the realm of fairy-story,” as J. R. R. Tolkien called them—come with their own rules, their own customs, and their own logic.

“The realm of fairy-story,” Tolkien writes in “On Fairy-Stories,” “is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.”

At their best, imaginary worlds offer an immersive experience. We enter, we are filled with wonder, and we are changed by the experience.

Imaginary worlds don’t just happen. They must be built—whether prior to or during the telling of the story. Builders of worlds seek coherence, consistency, feasibility, and that ever-important “cool factor.” World-builders are both creator and first explorers of their worlds, inspired by personal experiences, real world history, the mysteries of human evolution, or grandly conceived “what ifs.” They draw on African, Celtic, Greek, Native American, and Norse mythologies and landscapes, among others.

Below, Tim Akers, Mark Chadbourn, K. V. Johansen, Kay Kenyon, M. D. Lachlan, Justina Robson, and Joel Shepherd discuss their imaginary worlds and how they created them. These seven authors, all of whom publish with Pyr, write a wide variety of speculative fiction, from historical fantasy to science fiction to “steampunk and sorcery.” They’ve “thought-formed” worlds, “liquid-life-engines”, starfish-shaped universes, and worlds very similar to our own, except for a few crucial deviations.

Some of these authors started building their worlds by “reading and thinking and studying. ” Some planned ahead, while others allowed the world to grow with the writing. Some started with an “odd thought,” others with compelling characters—characters like a princess turned warrior, an archaeologist in the Otherworld, a caravan-guard fleeing madness, a star pilot grieving the loss of his family, or a synthetic human pursuing answers while fleeing for her life.

Whatever the method or starting point, the goal seems to be the same: a place suitably strange, yet somehow recognizable.

What’s something really cool about your secondary world that doesn’t show up in any of your novels or short stories?

Tim Akers: For the book I’m working on right now, there’s about four or five hundred years of history that I’ve sketched out, from migration patterns to wars to the establishment of three different religions, two of which are dead by the time the actual books start. I keep finding myself wanting to write those stories instead, or in addition to. I can really see how authors can fall into the temptation of interrupting a series to go write a prequel or something.

Mark Chadbourn: In my interlinked sequences that began with Age of Misrule, the secondary world is the mystical Otherworld of Celtic mythology, the home of gods, Fabulous Beasts, magic and mayhem. Every time a character crosses over from our own world, he or she sees different aspects of it, or it appears subtly altered. What is never stated is that it’s a thought-form world, completely fluid in nature, which is created and shaped by the mind and preconceptions of the people who visit it.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: I write historical fantasy, so it’s our world but with the mythology taken literally. So, as I’m writing at the beginning of the Viking age, the gods do interfere in human destinies. Witches exist. Magic is taken directly from that described in ancient Norse poetry. The coolest thing is how strange history is—how differently people think and act to modern people. For instance, the size of the settlements. In Wolfsangel, Vali looks on the town of Haithabu as unimaginably large. It contains one hundred houses.

K.V. Johansen: Some of the history of the Old Great Gods and the devils is quite cool, I think. I know a lot more about the cold hells and the “heavens beyond the stars” in which the human storytellers place the Great Gods and devils than appears in the published stories. But I’m not going to talk about that yet! (Although people can probably figure a part of it out. In “The Storyteller” there’s a bit more about that than in Blackdog.) In general, though, because of the way I work, the world grows as I write. I don’t usually see much of what lies over the horizon until not too long before the story gets there. That’s true of both the physical landscape and the social/historical/cosmological landscape, the cultures and the systems of magic.

Kay Kenyon: My secondary world, called the Entire, is both a world and a universe. It is a landlocked universe that is shaped like a starfish, in that it has five geographic arms, or “primacies,” radiating outward from a central sea of impossible, vaguely oceanic matter. Things are so cosmically far apart that the only efficient way to travel is on the Nigh, a five-armed river fed from the central sea over which is suspended the Ascendancy where advanced beings dwell when they’re not up to no good.

Justina Robson: I guess you mean this secondary world I’m making right now. Animal-people, I’d have to say. I haven’t done those before. They’re biomorphs: life-liquid-engines. Haven’t entirely finished working on their true nature. It’s been very hard going. My imagination wants them to be one way and my scientific brain is telling me it’s all never going to work so. . . obviously imagination has to win eventually and I’m struggling towards that.

Where did you start building your secondary world?

Mark Chadbourn: I looked first at the old stories of Celtic mythology, and then at other mythologies—Norse, Greek, Native American, Chinese, African and more—searching for commonalities. The conceit is that this world is the source of all our stories, our myths, legends and folklore, our dreams, so it needed to be very much an ur-world that could speak to all cultures.

K.V. Johansen: I started with the landscape of the Turkmenistan desert and the idea of small, local gods. In Blackdog, the mountains, a combination of the Himalayas and the mountains of central Asia, came into it almost right away, with the Siberian taiga lurking in the northeast. In a way, the seed of the world is a book and a TV series, Realms of the Russian Bear, on the natural history of the former Soviet Union; both the BBC producer and the Russian host were biologists, so it’s a cut above the usual sort of nature documentary and the book is very detailed. I had a fascination with the landscape and natural history described in that for some time, and when the story began, with the idea of the character who became Holla-Sayan being possessed by the Blackdog, it just always seemed to have existed in that landscape.

Kay Kenyon: I started with the odd thought, what if you didn’t need space travel to get across the universe, but could instead sort of hoof it? What if you could walk to Alpha Centauri or the equivalent? And if you can walk, obviously there are no stars or space. So what is this place? It’s a tunnel. It burrows through our own universe. At this point you have to write the story to find out what the hell is going on.

Joel Shepherd: For me it always starts with the cultures, politics, belief systems, and languages of various parts of the world. And that is always driven by the dramatic requirements of the story. In A Trial of Blood and Steel, I wanted to tell a story largely driven by the conflicts between the different values that arise from different kinds of civilizations. My main character was a young woman, a former princess who renounced her heritage to become a warrior in the somewhat exotic style of distant Saalshen. I loved the dramatic conflicts that sprung from a main character, one who chooses to give up that status and privilege for something that suits her better as a person. But I needed to have a land where that would be possible, because in a lot of lands it wouldn’t be. And so I came up with Lenayin, a land of individualist warriors where the royal family has only very precarious power, and inherited title means little, because everyone worships achievements and skill more than family. Much of that creation of Lenayin was driven by my need to make my main character’s situation believable.

Once I had Lenayin, the other lands and peoples evolved at least in part as foils for Lenayin. For example, the main enemies or bad guys of the series turn out to be people who live in the more traditional European feudal system, which Lenays mainly detest because of the serfdom it forces most of the population into. And that clash of values is reflected in the beliefs of my characters, which then becomes the kind of personal, dramatic tension that makes stories work.

Tim Akers: Because of my particular background, religion and cosmology inform pretty much everything I do. So I always start with the gods, the religions, the hidden powers that work beneath the world. That informs culture, which informs history, which in turn informs plot and character. I tend to start big and work my way down into the specific. Of course, that reveals a lot of my weaknesses as a writer, too. I’m good at the grand patterns, but I’m still learning how to craft the perfect character.

In what manner did you develop the secondary world from the original seed?

Justina Robson: By reading and thinking and studying a lot of social-science material, anthropology, and daydreaming. This was all very distracting from the real development of the story, but I wanted a credible base layer, even if I never actually write about it directly. It has to make a kind of sense to me in terms I am content with. So I’ve been trying to figure out realistic and necessary conditions for everything that the story has. Unfortunately this has sometimes made me attempt to “answer” the mysteries of human cultures, their evolution and possible biological origins, trying to separate necessary things from chance and memetic accretions. . . a totally impossible Gordian knot. So now I’m down to choosing where I cut the knot and what statements about the present I’m really trying to make. But I’m often distracted and also dismayed that many of my observations are so damning. I’m trying to dig my way out of Western, Christianized, secular, liberal, and capitalist culture and. . . ugh. . . it’s nearly impossibly hard and manic, like some kind of Whack-A-Credo. You get one, and four more pop up from your unconsciou But it’s worth a stab at something a little bit more than just a reactionary OMYGODWUT.

Kay Kenyon: Once I had the tunnel idea and knew that an advanced civilization created the Entire, I started asking questions like, who would live there? How like or unlike humans will they be? What technologies do they have? If this universe is a tunnel, what mechanism creates day and night, if such exists? Each of these answers constrains and/or influences the answer to the next question, and so forth, until you begin to find a coherent world, suitably strange, but with anchors to human experience. At times this process is exhilarating and sometimes you expect it to collapse like a house of cards. Not the least of the challenges is how to make such an improbable place coherent yet mysterious, strange but somehow recognizable.

Tim Akers: For my second book, The Horns of Ruin, I developed a story about three gods who were brothers, and who ended up betraying each other until only one of them was still alive. Then I imagined the church that would be built on that kind of history, and then what a society based on that church would look like. The tone of that kind of theocracy is going to flavor everything, from your architecture to the way the three churches interact, to why people would choose to serve a god who was dead, or a god who murdered his brother. Again, I built from the large (gods killing each other!) to the small, and then built a plot around that.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: I started with research into the Viking age. This meant I read a general historical text on the Vikings, some of the sagas and also the Eddas. The Eddas are the 14th-century poems written by an Icelandic historian, Snorri Sturluson. He collected oral poems and wrote them down. These form the main plank of our knowledge about Viking myth. At that point I started writing. It’s always better to start writing sooner rather than later. If you find out, or decide, that the deck on your longship isn’t as extensive as you first wrote, you can always change it later. I then research as I go along—reading books on Viking ships or arms and armor, for instance and getting information from the many great web resources. If I were in a completely invented world I wouldn’t have to bother with all this and would just start writing immediately after I had the idea for the story.

K.V. Johansen: The local gods, which are such a vital part of the Blackdog secondary world, grew out of the existence of the Blackdog. There he was; I had to find out why. The incarnate goddess who needed a guardian was the why, and the rules of the world grew out of developing a theology in which this limited, lake-bound goddess could exist. As the world developed, with its local gods and goddesses, the demons of the wild places, the Old Great Gods and the banished devils, the Blackdog didn’t seem to be quite any of them. I had that question in the back of my mind for most of the book: What, really, was the Blackdog? Wondering about that led to a lot of ancient history developing as an underpinning for his existence, which now seems such a foundation for the world that it’s a bit disconcerting to remember that none of that was there when I started.

Once I had the idea of local gods who were very limited in their powers, it seemed to make sense that there wouldn’t be very many large kingdoms or empires; the limited gods would lead to limited tribal regions. Geography shapes culture, so there are larger groupings of peoples linked by common culture and language, but a person’s emotional attachment is to a much smaller idea of place, and the political units are also usually centred on individual gods or goddesses. There are certainly kingdoms containing more than one god, but they’re usually not great monolithic nations, which prevent their kings being absolute monarchs. Only a few empires have ever existed.

Setting the story along a caravan route meant that I could explore the different cultures linked by that road. It’s the sort of world where you could get a lot of isolationist, mistrustful cultures, but instead it turned out to be one where this river of trade and travel means there is a constant flow of cultural influence and language. As Holla-Sayan travelled, I had to keep developing new gods and places, which meant looking at new interpretations of the basic idea of a god limited in territory and influence.

Mark Chadbourn: The danger of creating an ur-world was that it would be too familiar, filled with too many tropes that we’d all seen played out in books, films, and TV over the years. Once I’d identified the elements that spoke to many disparate cultures, I needed to twist them, turning archetypes into elements that were three-dimensional, rich and unique. Part of the process included re-naming some concepts—for instance, dragons—to prevent readers bringing a bagful of preconceptions to the story. By the time the reader had figured out what the things are, I’d had space to imprint my reading upon it.

Do you ever get bogged down in the world-building process?

Justina Robson: Endlessly. I use it as an excuse not to write the story or to stop writing when I feel very anxious and. . . well. . . as an excuse for everything really. I keep coming up against my inner demon which tells me I have to be right or I can’t go on. I have to solve it. I have to solve everything, or I’m unjustified in making whatever flaky claim my story is trying to make in the face of a relentlessly nitpicky universe. I escape by reading romances and novels by people who are smart enough never to care about this stuff. I realize it’s starting to sound like I think world-building is pointless. I don’t. But for me, story is first. If the world is going to get in the way because of some notion that I am writing SF and therefore it has to make a literal sense, it doesn’t want to make because it is really all metaphors then metaphors must win. Every time. All the time. I never give two hoots for anyone else’s cruddy world-building if their story blows my mind. I might potshot at it later, and god help them if the story blows. But if it’s good, I don’t care at all. I am in it for the trip, not the brochure.

K.V. Johansen: Possibly—if by bogged down you mean distracted, so that the world-building takes over and the adventure gets sidetracked. “This is getting interested, let’s keep going and see what that’s like. Oh, wait, that has nothing to do with this particular story.” There’s a southern continent across an ocean channel which has trade with the Five Cities. The Five Cities aren’t in Blackdog either, but they’re there, Nabbani colonies east and south of Marakand. And the early history of Marakand, the city where the eastern and western caravan roads meet, is really fascinating and can distract me from the more immediate history that is the story in hand. But name a place Marakand, which is fairly obviously derived from Asmarakand, which became Samarkand, and it’s crying out for a mysterious, romantic past, isn’t it? And I can start hunting for books from which to develop some small detail and end up with a stack of six histories, reading for background on something that’s going to be a tiny presence in the story itself. I guess I like things to have roots. (Also, it’s an excuse to add to my library, of course.) It’s really important for the world not to end at the edges of the map and for there to be a past before the story begins, a foundation for everything, but sometimes I can end up knowing more about the past of something than its present, and have to step out of it a bit and refocus on the story’s here and now. I don’t work out things like that in advance, though. They unfold, or I go chasing after them, as I get to them, and then I can end up with pages I have to cut out and stash in another file because it’s not part of the story; it’s just stuff that I have to know so the story can go on.

Tim Akers: I can spend too much time on world-building, because it’s the part that makes me tick. I started as a designer of roleplaying games, and I still have a great deal of affection for the tabletop dice. In fact, if it were possible to just make a living creating and deploying hyper-deep worlds for people to explore, that’s probably what I would be doing. I suppose I could make a go of it in the computer game industry, but I’m focused on honing my craft as a writer. Plus I love words, I love language, and I love story. I’m not sure you can practice all of that in that industry.

Joel Shepherd: [I don't get bogged down] really, but there are times when I feel the story becomes bogged down if I haven’t sufficiently developed the world. The characters, and therefore the story, must interact with their environment in a way that enriches the story. If the world isn’t sufficiently developed, sometimes I’ve felt there just isn’t any energy happening between the characters and their world, much the same as a relationship between characters that lacks energy or excitement. So I have to go away and think for a bit about what’s missing from the world, and what would liven up the experience.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: If I were writing a traditional fantasy, I wouldn’t bother about very detailed world-building at all before I started writing. I’d just have a character in an interesting dilemma and start making it up from there. It’s a complete distraction for a writer to take thousands of notes on his or her invented world before sitting down to write. Stories are about people—from The Lord of the Rings through Earthsea and Moorcock to modern day fantasy. The world is essentially a setting for people to do things in. No one comes to a book to read about the exact appearance of a Black Rider. They come to the book to share Frodo’s terror, to marvel at his bravery and ingenuity in escaping the dark forces. So my advice would be to make it up as you go along. When I wrote the character of Loki in Wolfsangel I didn’t map him out beforehand. He appeared in the story and I heard him start to speak. I didn’t realize my witches were using a magic system based on bodily denial and self-inflicted torture before they actually appeared. I started writing the character of the witch queen in a scene where she had had a premonition of disaster. The way she went about her magic just appeared on the page.

Kay Kenyon: I favor complicated worlds. There are days when I think I’m going too far, but can’t seem to help myself. The distortions of the mundane world may be too much fun; they can threaten, by their very detail, to sink the premise. The only way out of this snarl is to start writing. Plot and character are a great discipline to me; they force me to focus and sometimes simplify.

Have there been any cataclysmic events in your secondary world? If so, how did it change the world?

Justina Robson: The shapeshifters developed weapons of mass destruction, and now there’s an arms race. But really, that’s a side issue. The cataclysm is a very slow one: the shapeshifters evolving faster, smarter, and encroaching on the “human” ground.

K.V. Johansen: In the Blackdog world, the first war involving the devils happened so long ago that it’s not really remembered well in human stories, and is described as a war of wizards by some characters. The gods of the empire of Tiypur (and the empire itself as a political entity) were destroyed, so the region of Tiypur is now a land without gods. What that means for the world, that lack of any divinity there, is something that will come up later as the story, I hope, goes on. People from that part of the world, like Thekla in Blackdog, worship a memory of gods they know are dead, pray to gods they know can’t hear them. That’s an interesting state of mind. If the gods of your world are real and other people of other folks (or tribes or lands) can interact with their gods, and you and your people can’t, because you know your gods are dead, where do you find your focus, the core of your identity as a folk? What might end up filling that emotional vacuum for people? One battle of that war also had a physical effect further east, in the blighted landscape of the eastern shore of the Kinsai’av in Blackdog; there’s a region all along the river that’s still a wasteland because of it.

In The Shadow Road, the fourth book of my Warlocks of Talverdin series about the Nightwalkers, a lot of the action takes place in a world suffering a supervolcano-induced ice age, not unlike that nuclear winter that we all thought might be coming when I was a teenager once WWIII came along. The supervolcano was triggered by misuse of a particular and not fully understood magic as much as by natural processes. The population of the planet has been pretty much wiped out, many in the initial disaster but most of the rest in a slow decline as the climate changes; it’s reached the point when the story happens that glaciers cover much of the world and civilization, in the true meaning of the word, has ended. One of the heroes is living in what she thinks is probably the last settlement of people alive in the entire world.

Kay Kenyon: My world has had short geologic ages during which it was formed and then populated by degree, in a process of copying life forms from “our” universe, the Rose. But this creation period is in back story, not brought on stage. Aside from that, the story contains a cataclysmic event in one of the “minorals” or offshoots of a “primacy.” It’s an event that demonstrates the ruling class ruthlessness and contributes to an uprising.

What goes into the development of a magic system?

K.V. Johansen: Some research and lots of (desperate) inspiration! In world of Blackdog, each region has its own forms and rituals of magic. Coming up with these and having them evolve as the story moves from region to region is challenging, sometimes. They all have to have some common ground, too, as the magic underneath is all the same. Sometimes it’s just something that leaps out as a neat idea while I’m writing, like the Grasslander cat’s-cradles, and sometimes it involves a lot of thinking about similar cultures in the primary world and what they believed had power.

Tim Akers: Again, a lot of my experience with this comes from my time in RPGs. Personally, I need to figure out power sources, the strict rules of the powers, the costs and benefits and dangers of them. But on top of that you have to figure out how these things fit into the culture. Especially when religion gets involved, you can really end up with some complicated societal effects to magic. What roles do belief and faith play in world where there’s manifest arcane and divine power all around? In what ways have dogma impacted the culture’s understanding of magic and its application? Those kinds of questions really drive my construction of the magical systems in my worlds. What fun is making up dogma if you can’t make up heresy?

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: Like all writing, the development of magic comes from what you already know and a desire to do something new—and in my case an irritation with the tropes of traditional horror and fantasy.

Reviewers have commented that they haven’t seen a magic system like mine in fantasy before. I found this surprising, because it’s the magic that people practice in the real world. My magic is based on starvation, pain, denial of sleep, drowning, and freezing. It’s a magic of ordeal, and you can see it used in everything from Inca death rituals to Yoga, the desert retreats of Christian mystics, the sweat lodges of the Native Americans, the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the dances of the Dervishes. I have a good grounding in myth and real world magic—although I don’t believe in its literal truth—because I’ve been interested in magic and witchcraft since I was a child. I’ve done a lot of reading, so I have a lot to draw on.

I came to the specifics of my magic system through two ideas. The first is an extract from the Edda, in which Odin gives his eye for knowledge of the runes. The second was when I read that Norse mystics would seat themselves on a high chair to perform their prophecies. It occurred to me that this might be to deny themselves sleep. From there I needed an idea of the runes and I just envisaged them as living things that root in the mind of the sorcerer, sustained by her rituals and starvation. I took that, I think, from a misreading of the Poetic Edda. There’s this beautiful verse which describes Odin’s sufferings for magic:

I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.
No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
then I fell back from there

This verse is the key to everything that happens in the Wolfsangel books. The misreading was of the “shrieking” (screaming in some translations). I originally read it that the runes were shrieking, not Odin. This gave me the idea that they were living things. Magic is solely a female preserve in my world. Men regard it as effeminate and beneath them, something you’d only resort to if you were too weak to fight. Again, this comes directly out of the Norse myth. The gods practice magic, but Norse gods are quite a gender-bending bunch.

My werewolf came from the idea of getting rid of the normal werewolf tropes that Hollywood invented. There’s no changing with the full moon, no silver bullets, no separation of the wolf and human identities. It always annoyed me that a 150-pound man could turn into a two-ton wolf within an hour. I know we’re dealing with magic, so anything is possible. But that always struck me as contrary to the laws of physics. Matter is coming from nowhere. My werewolf changes slowly, over a period of about a year. He puts on weight by eating people. My werewolf’s transformation is one-way—no changing back—and the wolf is consuming his personality from the inside. The idea of linking it to the myth of the Fenris wolf arrived about half way into the writing of the book. Again, I didn’t plan on or let it worry me that I hadn’t got every last detail worked out. The feel of the story was right and that was all that mattered.

If I were designing a magic system for a pure fantasy novel I’d avoid fireballs or “six-gun magic”—that is, magical effects that could just be a replacement for a gun or a laser pistol. It’s important in any writing to avoid cliché. The only thing you need to do is come up with something new, that is, if you want to write something really memorable. If you just want to churn out another genre standard, then you can embrace its clichés. That said, you should always strive to do something new in some way. Otherwise why not just read the stuff that’s already out there, and save yourself the bother of writing? You might write a bestseller by adhering to the genre’s clichés, but that’s not what writing’s about. If you’re in it to make money, become a banker. Writing—and fantasy writing in particular—is about striving for something unique and resonant.

Justina Robson: Far-future technologies in my case. Or, as it is also known, “pseudoscientific jargon.” Magic is either incomprehensibly useful technology that allows you to write a story in a certain way or it is a straight metaphor for creativity and charisma. In either case it has to hold water convincingly and logically. Someone has to pay somehow. Nothing is free.

Mark Chadbourn: My stories are split between our own world and the Otherworld, and I needed a magic system that would not jar too much with our contemporary existence. I went back and researched the occult systems of magicians—from John Dee to Aleister Crowley to modern chaos magicians—and identified what would fit in my cosmology.

When it comes to world-building, what are you good at and not as good at? How have you taken advantage of the strengths and compensated for the weaknesses?

Tim Akers: I touched on this before, but I think it’s important for writers to not just compensate for their weaknesses. We need to meet them head on. It’s easy to use our strengths as a crutch to cover up our weaknesses, but we’d be better off as artists and craftsman to actively engage our weaknesses and improve them. When I first started writing I was terrible at dialogue. That’s just a matter of craft, so I really studied language, the way people talk, the way they communicate, and now dialogue is one of the things that I’m good at. When it comes to world-building, my strengths lie in religion, in magic, and in backstory. The larger the scale, the better I do. My weakness is character. So I push myself to make characters that make me uncomfortable, that stretch my admittedly simple boundaries. There’s no way for me to get better if I don’t. And while I’m not good enough to produce truly revolutionary character tropes, I resist the urge to fall back on the comfortable, simple character tropes that permeate so much of fantasy.

Kay Kenyon: I think my strength is sense of wonder and depth. When I take on a particularly bizarre world, one of the things I work hard at is believability—that is, creating verisimilitude despite unlikely claims. Part of the job is not to rely over much on explaining, but using point of view and character to soften/authenticate strangeness. One aspect of world building that I admire in others and don’t accomplish to my satisfaction is alien language—that is, creating an intriguing a lexicon. I minimize the use of foreign words.

Joel Shepherd: I’m good at cultures and civilizations on the broad scale. I enjoy the complexities—not because I’m addicted to needless complexity, but because complexity exists everywhere in the real world, and I’ve always found it fascinating. I’m also good at politics and political science broadly (I’m currently writing an international relations PhD), and those kinds of struggles form a lot of the motivations of my characters.

Not so good at? Making it simple. Some people like simple. My work’s probably not for them. I like reading stuff myself where I have to work a little bit, because that’s the experience of the real world. If you ever travel to some foreign nation, getting accustomed to the language and customs and so forth always takes some work. That’s the fun of it. If I don’t get that from a story, it doesn’t feel real to me. I can only imagine the readers who don’t like to work are people who don’t like to travel much either. I’ve had to work at keeping my story structure as simple as feasible, to explain the world in ways that are dramatically interesting, so don’t feel at all like reading an encyclopedia. That’s always the danger.

Character or world? If you had to give up one or the other, which would it be?

Tim Akers: Sadly, character. I’m a world-builder first. Again, it’s a personal weakness, one that I’m trying to overcome. Writers need to learn to clearly identify their weaknesses and go after them, rather than trying to prop them up with their strengths. But I don’t know that I could write a book that was just a character study. I’m not to that point in my development as a craftsman just yet.

Joel Shepherd: Easy: Character is everything. Worlds are only interesting to the extent that there are interesting characters to populate them. It’s very much like the line about “If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to see, did it really fall?” What is a world without characters to experience it, vicariously, on the behalf of the reader?

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: Characters exist only in their world. You can’t have one without another. A ninth-century Viking is a very different person than a 21st-century teenager. The world shapes the character, and the world only comes to life through the character’s eyes. The mines of Moria would look very different if you were describing them from the point of view of an Orc. That said, I’m not very interested in traditional fantasy world-building, at least as a writer. It’s very hard, this far into fantasy’s evolution as a genre, to come up with anything new or interesting.

I believe this is why people like George R. R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie have steered clear of worlds packed with monsters and magic and alien races. In fact, I’d argue that the weakest part of Martin’s work is the traditional monsters. I found the Others pretty dull and I love A Game of Thrones. Martin’s strength is in his brilliantly realized characters.

To me, another race of elves, another beast man, or another bird woman is much less interesting than the interplay of characters. I’m not interested in how your dwarves smelt their gold. I regard that as a decoration to the story. I’m more interested in how your dwarf thinks, and how that affects his or her interaction with your main characters. This is why I chose historical fantasy. The world-building’s done for you, though, of course, you still have to come up with your interpretation of both the history and the myth. Then uou can get on with telling the story.

Justina Robson: [Character and world] are inseparable. Actions are meaningless without context. Character creates their world and vice versa in an eternal round.

Mark Chadbourn: All stories are about characters. [A world without characters] would be like have a theater stage with no actors on it. I know some people get whipped up with enthusiasm in their world-building, but the world should really be devised to underpin the themes the author wants to discuss. The themes come out of the characters.

K.V. Johansen: The characters are shaped by their world and can’t exist without it. If I put Holla-Sayan and Moth into another world, they wouldn’t be Holla-Sayan and Moth anymore; they’d have to be different people shaped by that world, whatever it was.

Kay Kenyon: In a forced choice, I would give up world-building. I would be terribly disappointed, but after all, stories are about people. Flat characters can’t (for me) provide enough horsepower for a great read.

Do you have any parting words of advice, encouragement, or mischief for fellow world-builders out there?

Tim Akers: Think big; write small. You can have the most awesome, mind-breaking idea for a world that anyone has ever seen, but if it isn’t populated by interesting characters that engage the reader—doing things that are interesting in locales that are interesting—you’re going to lose your audience. It doesn’t matter how cool your idea is. You have to execute on every stage of the writing process to pull it off.

Joel Shepherd: Travel.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: Don’t build worlds. Write. The world that emerges as you do so will be far more complex and interesting than anything you dryly invent separately to your characters and the story. Mapping out the city of the Night People is just an excuse for not writing. The Lord of the Rings is “a tale that grew in the telling.” Over-planning can kill writing. This isn’t to say that the enchantment of a well-thought-out world is unimportant. It’s just secondary to the characters. Get them right, and everything else falls into place. And use a light touch with the details of your world. One well-chosen sentence or metaphor is preferable to ten pages of detailed description. No one cares that your tree folk use hammocks made of vines. They care that your hero finds them uncomfortable to sleep in.

Justina Robson: Have fun!

Mark Chadbourn: Choose the overarching story you want to tell first, then decide what kind of characters you need to play it out. Only then start putting together the kind of world that will best illustrate all the elements of your story. Otherwise you face the danger of a wonderfully lavish world populated by characters with nothing to say.

K.V. Johansen: Read lots of nonfiction. You never know what apparently random seed is going to take root and grow into something interesting.

Kay Kenyon: Anchor your world to some familiar things so that you don’t ask too much of the reader. I think SF/F readers will do half the work of imagining, but you can’t ask them to share an opium dream. Also, don’t explain everything. It can undermine your world rather than justify it. As encouragement: Only science fiction and fantasy will allow you to have so much fun being the god of a world. Enjoy the act of creation!

Mischief: Never kill a dog. I did that in one book, and it sold the worst of all of mine.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: You don’t need a wodge of notes about your world. You’re a writer—write, and make it up as you go along.

Tim Akers (shadoth.blogspot.com) is the author of The Horns of Ruin and The Burn Cycle.

Mark Chadbourn’s trilogies (www.markchadbourn.net) include The Age of Misrule, The Dark Age, Kingdom of the Serpent, and Swords of Albion.

K. V. Johansen (www.kvj.ca/blackdog) is the author of Blackdog, as well as such series as Torrie Quests, The Cassandra Virus, and The Warlocks of Talverdin.

Kay Kenyon’s (www.kaykenyon.com) The Entire and the Rose series began with Bright of the Sky and has continued to the fourth installment, Prince of Storms.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe is the author of Wolfsangel and Fenrir, as well as Girlfriend 44 and The Elfish Gene under his real name, Mark Barrowcliffe.

Justina Robson (justinarobson.blogspot.com) is the author of Mappa Mundi, Silver Screen, and the Quantum Gravity series.

Joel Shepherd is the author of a science fiction series about Cassandra Kresnov and the fantasy series A Trial of Blood and Steel.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Word: Reading as Performance

Daniel Abraham

My main complaint, and reason my interest flagged, was that both the characters and setting seemed flat.
—SF Reader on A Shadow in Summer

. . .an imagined world of this quality: for a city as graceful and fascinating as Saraykhet, and for such persuasively human characters.
—Strange Horizons on A Shadow in Summer

One of the things that my wiser friends and acquaintances told me when my first book, A Shadow in Summer, came out was not to read the reviews. The bad ones would hurt my feelings and the good ones would swell my head. Seriously, it’s a dumb thing to do.

So yeah, of course I did it. Still do. Terrible habit.

The thing that confused me then, and for several years since, is how often thoughtful intelligent, committed, professional readers can bring their best critical faculties to a book and come back with totally incompatible reports. The world-building is great, or it’s strictly paint-by-numbers. The characters are fascinating and complex, or they’re cardboard. The plot is full of well-crafted surprises, or it’s all telegraphed from page one.

I came to the same conclusion that all authors reach: the reviewers who liked me are intelligent, deep-souled bastions of wisdom, and the ones who didn’t are a bunch of weak-brained punks. Mystery solved.

But here’s the thing. Once the initial emotional rush plays out and my amygdala calms back down to its natural state, I start to think that maybe something else is going on here. That maybe I’ve misunderstood what reading is.

There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.—The New York Times on Lolita, 1958

Technically it is brilliant, Peter-De-Vries humor in a major key, combined with an eye for the revealing, clinching detail of social behavior. . . one of the funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year.—Also The New York Times, also on Lolita, also in 1958. Seriously. WTF, folks?

On one level, everyone knows this. Every reader brings their own experience to a story. How you read something depends on who you are. I’ve had that experience myself. I tried four times to read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and couldn’t get into it for love or money. Then the fifth time, I fell into it and read the whole damn thing in three sittings. I’ve had books that I loved at one point in my life, and reread only to discover that the suck fairy had come and left great big piles of ohmigodthisisawful. It’s one of those things that we all tacitly understand, usually without thinking too much about why it’s true or what it means.

So let’s talk about your neocortex for a minute.

There’s this fairly brilliant book called On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee that talks about a model of brain function that gets the shorthand of memory-prediction. I’m not going to dive very deep into it here, but if you get the time, it’s seriously interesting stuff. The one point that I want to borrow is that many times more neurons come into the visual neocortex from deeper in the brain than do from the eyes.

The theory Hawkins puts forward (and I find it fairly persuasive) has it that most of what triggers activity in the visual neocortex is predictive information from other parts of the brain. Or, more loosely translated, most of what we see, we evoke. And that also matches my experience as a reader.

I remember one time in late high school or early college, reading a book that was particularly working for me. I’d been in it for hours, picturing the action, hearing the voices, listening to the narrator’s voice. When I put the book down to go make dinner, it was physically disorienting. I had been chasing the villain through a ruined castle, and now I was halfway to my kitchen. It felt dislocating. It felt like still being halfway in a dream.

I’ve always heard the idea of reading as evoking a “literary dream” attributed to Damon Knight, but I suppose he may have gotten the phrase from someplace else. The thing that it’s taken me decades to figure out is that the phrase isn’t a metaphor. If I’m right, the mechanism that lets me look at a white sheet of paper with black inked letters on it and see the Balrog pulling Gandalf into the pit is the same one that lets me close my eyes at night and see my old elementary school filled up with bats or whatever my brain is handing up to my visual centers. And the same holds true for other aspects of my reading experience. The sounds I hear, the scents I smell, the emotions I feel are all being drawn up from deep inside of me and experienced just the way they would be in a dream.

A really objective review of a book would be about a book as. . . well, as an object. “I find the use of a sans serif font problematic, and the thick bond of the paper gives the book a weight that exaggerates its true word count.” Or, you know. Whatever. Point is, it wouldn’t be useful.

I don’t want an objective review of a book. I want an idea of what kind of subjective experience I’m likely to have when I read it. I’m assuming that’s what most readers of reviews are looking for too. As an extra added bonus, it would be nice if the review added some insight or depth that would help me experience the story in a way that was even more compelling and involving than I would have managed on my own. But hey, no pressure.

In that light, the reason that two reviewers can come to the same text and come back totally dissimilar reports is pretty clear. They aren’t describing the same experience.

I’ve seen three productions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The first one was in high school, and as I recall most of the right words were spoken in more or less the right order. The second was at a Shakespeare festival, and it was a much better, much more interesting play. Same words, same order, but a different company and director and just plain all-around better. The third one was on Broadway with Patrick Stewart as Prospero, and a lot of really interesting and deeply non-period production and design decisions that made the play into a comment on race relations and the legacy of American slavery. Each time it was the same script, the same story, but the variations in the performance made it utterly different.

And that’s the thing. When we read, we’re performing. We read a sentence like “Wet cobblestones glittered in the sudden sunlight like a thousand golden coins,” and maybe we see a wide street glowing in pointillist yellow-white. Or maybe we picture a couple dozen cobbles and a picture of goldwork we saw in National Geographic once. Or maybe we just agree that the rain stopped and it got sunny before skip ahead to the sword fight coming up next.

With every story, every book, we are the acting troupe and the director and the props and special effects folks. How well we are able to evoke a dream from the words on the page—what decisions we unconsciously make, what experience and history we have to draw from, how comfortable we are with the style of the writer who gave us the story — is going to vary. Some acting troupes do really great comedy but they’re only so-so for drama. Some have actors who can really embody a tragic character, but seem wrong when doing a song-and-dance bit. When we pick up a book, we’re like that too. Some books we’re ready to read. Some we’re suited for. Others, not so much.

That doesn’t mean that the text doesn’t matter. It does. Some writers are brilliant at guiding us through a dream, evoking sensory detail and drawing out emotions and weaving in philosophical and aesthetic abstractions in ways that make everything in the story seem deeper and more profound. Some write cool sword fights, if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. Some aren’t very good.

When a reviewer sets out to tell us what they thought, the experience they’re talking about is their private—can we call it intimate?—performance. It’s never something we can really share, and it may or may not be decent predictor of the experience we’ll have if we pick up the same book. Every review is like the description of a production of The Tempest put on once, for an audience of one, not repeated and not repeatable. Every story any of us read is the same.

For me, reading reviews of my stuff, this model of what it means to read pulls some of the sting. A bad review is disappointing, but it isn’t an indictment. There isn’t a perfect and certain judge of literature looking down from the bench and condemning me and my little offering now and forever. It’s more like a date that didn’t go well. Still sad. A little heartbreaking sometimes, if it’s someone whose opinion I care about. But it’s always something quiet and personal that happened—or didn’t happen—between the two of us, and that makes the failures a little more humane.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.